


I.-" - 



^ ^ ^ " 'ti-i i, . -' \ . V- 

v'*‘‘VV’* e ^V'**v ** i, ‘ 

V ^ 1 ^ .Vi A ^ 0 * 


y o * s'* A 




* }* ,0 
3N ° .O’ „-<>, % 


A V C ° N 

. W A A'A ^ f f 

.*• ^ *J©ll> e '® f'°* V’-S? 

.o*'V : ...-^^»h» , ’a0 0 ** 



x *9^ * 

ft <p. r 

'f S * ^ 
* <& ^ ", 



-/> 0 I 



A 

"A 

A 

aSS c 0 ^ * O.. 

A r ^-=ssti,V- 

*■ F =«^A; W . 


* '-^z/jy^ * , a ^ 

v * 

- * 8 | \ * \V , * 0 N 0 

^ V .S S ^^ > a0 




* ^ 



^ ^ } I) ^ ' ^> 





v> 


s- «d 

*> av s\ \ 

A^ * : /l O V> 

A 

^ V"'A 


lit/ <■ ,A 

^ a& *= A? 

% 


'A ^ ^ 


y 



* <\V < 

* A 


0 9 S "* A 


* 

'^P A ' 

^ V s 

"'"Vo ,0o 

ft <A 

*> . <Cr 

* * * o / ' ; c- 

^ <& * A\ ^;%, o ^r> A* 

^ ^ « £Vs\ \ :r r y V jj, ’ </> -V 


on® 






■'* AA“ AA.’^’A 

<*. 

<* 


* flV ^ » 

■^> ' » * A A> <■ 

* o_ .o - * v 18 * <f> 


0 0 ,S 


>• 

^ " » . 

A * V * 0 ^ 

X * , , % "X 

- %<$> ;&M/h • ^ « 
*v a ; \- Of '* ' 

\. */> -. 1 '• y *■ a 

>t. * *<. '•'"■ sf ./< * A 

^ A s ' .o 4 - 

^ c » >■ c * V b. * * ' n'f A ’ » 



A < 



ZZ - 

C. /> 

C/ •><> 


V \> v 

-V” ^ ° "V * 'V r *£> 

0 . . * o , y + A O ^ 

<x V ’ B ^ *<V 0 N C 

u//^ + A ^ 

<• 

A « \ y ^ 


0^ 


0 N 



^ A V 

v i ft <‘ y 0 » x ^ A 

4- o. r c s’ *' <s> ,V o>- e 

s>- V*'+-j' -"p „ f 

s>* v ** .'^ ' \ '^s A^ K 

« O <y 9 f '•;• .s’- ■* V* v 

’ # 

v a * *. . rS^'/^ Wktbm 

% / X A :km ' 1 ^ 





•V 

5 ^ 



t ’% Z> 

,dr' X. - %a3a ° v 1 X j i/'X< ;■ ° aV a> 

y ipr v, a v a ■ ^ -»hf v. c 

ok ^ X' * * 1 V> ^ A y “ * 1 ;/. c;- ., X 1 "of!— 






WMl'Sk ' . jf -nu/sz^ * 

v \V1I 'fi*. \T vV^ \ 

oo' 

4 r/^ 

vV ^ ^ 

A «.r ^ ft r\ 

9 I A * s ^ * f ^ 5> n 0 ^ 

v S 



a\ 




+* 
















C y 0 * * ^ A 

A' 

1-> , 

* .V * 

x°^ a 


^ IT x * v* 

0_ X/ 7 c S aO 

n M r- ^ $ * s *N v i 

t 0 c * o_ .o v s 9 




%**«*>°\tVV. 

•a <A <* cA%^/)a ° <?‘ 

i> V 



y °^\ v \ X 0> 
# , C 



° A 


<S> <X V 


> '<* <• 
V 


V v 'UnL'*^ " ° * ° W* * ' * 0 f C> 

V A ^ ^XS t- J>, ^ , 

A v v - ^ili^ 7 c <$ % o * x s\ v ^ - ^tBlf * ** 

N <* . ^ v^^AN * "V * 0 v 

^ o^'v* v ■*% < V°**V A ^^V r a /0 ' ^V 1 

* ^ * ° u * *?/r7??->^ * *f* ip 4 fc <* o 0 v v 

< c^o Vfc. 1/1 * Jffi\I//yZ2-* *? jxX -k -sSN\\\^ ✓ 


ce 





H 'Tl 



x° °x. 


* «* 


0 K 0 


^ 4* 

,* rP c* t 

O f * Y * 0 * ^ 

is T* 



'oO 4 


8 l A 


•*. : - 
„/ v # . 

* \Y - . ^ * 


V x S HrCj * 






P„ A> 


0 V .V. 



X‘^'V 





> 


0 , X 


*b o x ' * 


S V s' 


..'V\*. ^ % 

. ■%, 4Vv *"^ 

-AWrW-:'h% 

37 .-vy <p 




on 0 


\° 9*. ^ 

’* ,o° c i *■», 

yy * ^ ^ t * 0 ^ 

* «A « stfkfAL°. -r> 



.A. O ^ y . . 

^ C 0 N c ♦ 

S * c~SSNv ^ O 
<«. cs5cv\Vh^ 

■; ^ o* 

' V A -K 

r> ^ » 

* A ^ ^ *, | 

,0 X y o«x' is .A Q* /f J s s 

0 > ^V 1 8 ^ <6 A' i° S. o r 0' V 

v v T*^. 1 *P j'b * . <" o o 



%/ *iiA V = 


^ -* 
ct* y 


A 'O ^ 



s s A u 



o v ' ^ V ‘"%’% 




‘ 0N °^> O' 

*' < ^ N " I ''*‘ ' r o0 < ; 

»• 

w “ * rr v• '* / ^ .., %' * ^ ' / V t. o,%." * 

' -- - A’ »:«s.* +■ 































THE SPIRIT OF MODERN 
PHILOSOPHY 


3tn <£&tfap 

IN THE FORM OF LECTURES 


BY 

JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph. D. 

PROFESSOR OF TH^' HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 






BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
(Cfie Uiliprsi&c prcstf, Cambnbse 
1899 






Copyright, 1892, 

By JOSIAH ROYCE. 

All rights reserved. 


& Tm y and Na^ry Club 

idiay 


The Riverside Press , Cambridge , Mass., U. S. A 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 


TO MY FRIEND 


JHarp (ESrap ©SHatH £)orr 

I GRATEFULLY DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
AS A TOKEN OF AFFECTION AND VENERATION 
IN RECOGNITION OF THE WISE COUNSEL 
THAT SUGGESTED ITS PREPARATION 
AND OF THE THOUGHTFUL ADVICE 
THAT ACCOMPANIED AND AIDED 
ITS GROWTH 





PREFACE. 


The friend to whom I have dedicated this book asked 
me, a little more than two years ago, for some account 
of the more significant spiritual possessions of a few 
prominent modern thinkers. I was to tell what I could 
about these possessions in comparatively brief and un- 
technical fashion. With some misgivings as to my right 
and many misgivings as to my power to set forth any 
portion of the content of modern philosophy in the com¬ 
pass of a few short lectures, I still undertook the task, 
and soon found it unexpectedly absorbing. The com¬ 
pany of friends for whom I was to prepare my lectures 
proved to be more numerous than I had foreseen; the 
undertaking became more elaborate and thorough-going 
than I had any way intended ; and the exceeding kindli¬ 
ness and earnestness of my hearers called erelong for a 
response that taxed all my poor wit to the utmost. My 
lectures once finished in their first form, under the 
general title “ Representative Modern Thinkers and 
Problems,” I was asked to read them yet again, before 
another equally cordial and stimulating company in 
another city. The re-reading suggested, of course, much 
revision. In the following year I again offered my 
papers, partly rewritten and much enlarged, to the 
members of Harvard University, as public evening leo 



VI 


PREFACE. 


tures. Still other opportunities to present all or part of 
the same material to various audiences caused me to get 
considerable critical aid. I then resolved to give the 
whole discussion a final form. 

This volume contains, therefore, an essay, in the shape 
of a series of lectures, and with a twofold object. On 
the one hand my essay deals not so much with the 
minuter details as with the connections, the linkages, 
the general growth, of modern philosophical thought 
since the seventeenth century. On the other hand my 
purpose is constructive as well as expository. I have 
my own philosophical creed, — a growing and still ele¬ 
mentary one, indeed; and this creed has been strongly 
suggested to me by what I know of the progress and 
outcome of modern thought. What I have seen I delight 
to try to suggest. And the book is the product of my 
delight, and the embodiment of my efforts at suggestion. 

On the other hand, these studies are not mere frag¬ 
ments, but are bound together by a single principal idea, 
this idea being the one that seems to me to embody the 
true spirit of modern philosophy, — the doctrine concern¬ 
ing the world which, amidst all our vast ignorance of 
nature and of destiny, we still have a right to call, in its 
main and simple outlines, a sure possession of human 
thought. What this doctrine is I have already had occa¬ 
sion to suggest in the more positive chapters of my book 
called “The Religious Aspect of Philosophy.” To the 
arguments of that work, particularly to the chapters 
therein entitled “ The Possibility of Error ” and “ The 
Religious Insight” (the first containing a metaphysical 
discussion of the proof of the main thesis of Objective 
Idealism, the other a general sketch of certain conse- 


PREFACE. 


vii 

quences of this thesis), I must refer such readers as may 
desire a fuller acquaintance with some matters of funda¬ 
mental importance which the present study, in view of its 
limitations, will leave more or less incomplete. But these 
lectures have their own unity, are intended to be under¬ 
stood by themselves, represent, I hope, a considerable 
advance in the organization of the philosophical doctrine 
which was set forth in the former book, and meanwhile 
have the decided advantage which the historical fashion 
of philosophizing always possesses as against the dialec¬ 
tical fashion. 

Our common dependence upon the history of thought 
for all our reflective undertakings is unquestionable. 
Our best originality, if we ever get any originality, must 
spring from this very dependence. Doctrines of genu¬ 
inely revolutionary significance are rare indeed in the 
history of speculation, and they ought to be so. Of 
lesser surprises, of marvels, of beautifully novel insights, 
all the greater highways of speculation are full; and 
yet most of the marvels are only such in so far as they 
are set off upon a very large background of the histori¬ 
cally familiar. Only a very few times in the history of 
thought is the continuity of the evolution distinctly 
broken. The novelties are elsewhere only relative, and 
get their very value from the fact that they are so. 

For us to-day, after so many centuries of philosophy, 
the necessity of keeping in mind our relation to earlier 
thought is peculiarly pressing, and the neglect (or mis¬ 
understanding) of those historical relations is peculiarly 
disastrous. Mere eclecticism in philosophy is of course 
worthless. But to condemn the past, as full of error and 
delusion, and then to set forth what we imagine to be our 


Vlll 


PREFACE. 


own fundamentally significant and wholly new methods 
in philosophy, is a procedure that in general can have but 
one ending. We, then, but unwittingly transplant old 
growths to new soil, seeing not how old the growths are, 
and considering only the newness of the garden that we 
have planned. But the new soil is of necessity lacking in 
the ancient wealth and depth, and the transplanted doc¬ 
trines take little root. Synthesis and critical re-organi¬ 
zation of the truths furnished us by the past, in the light 
of present science, is not mere eclecticism, and leaves 
ample room for healthy originality. On the other hand, 
it is so easy to feel a train of philosophical thought to be 
wholly new, merely because we have eagerly thought it 
out, and have been all the while unaware of our actual 
philosophical environment and atmosphere. And yet this 
subjective sensation of originality, — to what unnecessary 
cares, to what disappointments may it not in the end 
lead us! 

Such misadventures, I, for my part, am minded to 
avoid by remaining fully aware of my historical relations. 
Faithfulness to history is the beginning of creative wis¬ 
dom. I love the latter, and want to get it. To that end, 
however, I cultivate the former. 

The present philosophical situation in this country 
seems to be peculiarly favorable to such efforts. Two 
philosophical branches are especially prospering to-day 
in our Universities, the study of Empirical Psychology, 
and the study of the History of Philosophy. I believe 
for my own part that these two pursuits ought to flourish 
and will flourish together, and that they will lead to very 
important constructive work. I see no just opposition 
of spirit between them. 


PREFACE. 


IX 


A student of philosophy, who is also occasionally a 
critic of his living fellow-students, is of necessity glad to 
have applied to his own work the same tests that he would 
apply to the work of others, and severer tests, too, than 
he would have wit to apply. Where grave errors of schol¬ 
arship or profound misunderstandings of my historical 
relations mar my work, I desire to have the fact pointed 
out with the utmost definiteness of speech. For I bring 
no gold with me unless some portion of my work can 
bear the test of the most fiery trial. Let the dross suffer. 
I shall never regret the loss of it, nor feel aggrieved at 
the flames. I distinguish very easily between a student’s 
person and his teaching. Let the man be respected accord¬ 
ing as he has meant well, and has labored with sincere 
devotion. I myself have never had occasion to criticise 
any philosophical writer of whom this could not be sin¬ 
cerely said. But let the teaching be tried wholly without 
mercy, whether meant well or not. Were we, indeed, as 
negative critics in philosophy, assuming the right to be 
judges of the hearts and of the inner and personal merits 
of our living philosophical opponents instead of estimat¬ 
ing, as we do in such cases, their published work, I, for 
my part, remembering my own weakness and personal 
unworthiness, should be the first to echo, just as even 
now I do in the presence of God and man, the words of 
my departed friend, whose verses entitled “The Fool’s 
Prayer ” I have quoted in my closing lecture. But the 
criticism of the public deeds of scholarship, offered in the 
public service, is wholly independent of our personal fond¬ 
ness for a man, and involves no desire for other than 
intellectual contest with him. Therefore, such criticism, 


X 


PREFACE. 


whenever its wholly objective motive is understood, does 
well to be merciless. 

It is perhaps tedious, I am sure that I wish it were 
quite needless, to set forth here such obvious truisms as 
these. Most readers, indeed, will have them already in 
mind. For such they are not intended. 

However severe or kindly our critics, it is all the while 
true that a book must be judged by what it undertakes, 
and that this essay must, of course, have and confess 
the defects of its qualities. I have tried, accordingly, 
throughout my text, to avoid raising false expectations. 
The reader will, indeed, find here many things that at the 
outset he does not expect. I hope that some of these 
things will be a pleasing surprise to him. But in no case 
will he either expect or find technical completeness. To 
be sure, the later papers are more elaborate than the ear¬ 
lier ones; partly because I have added to my text many 
passages which were not read at all in my original lec¬ 
tures ; partly because I have expected my hearers and 
readers to grow a little in reflective patience as they be¬ 
came used to the argument. 

I may add a few special observations on various of 
the individual lectures. The traditional beginning of the 
story of modern thought with the Cartesian cogito ergo 
sum I have not employed, because it is almost universal 
in the text-books, and because, meanwhile, in its usual 
context, it produces, despite its literal accuracy, a very 
misleading impression. The seventeenth century was not 
on the whole a period of subjectivism, but the very re¬ 
verse. Descartes was himself best known to his contem¬ 
poraries, not for his theory of knowledge, but for his 
physical and metaphysical system. Of the philosophical 


PREFACE. 


XI 


Absolutism of the century Spinoza is meanwhile the best, 
because the extremest representative. Interested as I 
here am in the broad outlines and not in the details, 
I have, therefore, chosen to illustrate the general attitude 
of the time towards the deepest problems of the spirit by 
this extreme but still typical case of Spinoza, and to leave 
the rest to a brief general sketch. In the superficial 
glance over the period from Spinoza to Kant I have 
omitted Leibnitz altogether, and I feel this to be the most 
serious error of mere omission in my whole book. Yet 
the defect proved to be inevitable, in view of my space 
and time limitations. 

With the lecture on Kant begins a more careful study 
of doctrine. The modern Kant-philology has here been 
of indispensable service to me, so far as I have been able 
to follow it. Yet I have tried to write my own personal 
impression of Kant himself as plainly as I could. To 
Professors Yaihinger and Benno Erdmann every student 
of Kant owes a debt which, as I hope, I have not obscured 
for my readers by my playful remarks on pages 104-105. 
In the later historical lectures I have been unable to make 
sufficient acknowledgement of numerous literary obliga¬ 
tions. I feel such most of all to Julian Schmidt, to Pro¬ 
fessor Haym, to Dr. Hutchinson Stirling, to Professors 
Windelband, Falckenberg, and J. E. Erdmann, to Pro¬ 
fessor Edward Caird, and to Principal Caird. Of foot¬ 
notes I have been permitted by my plan to make only 
very scanty use. In case of my exposition of Hegel I 
have felt it needful to show by rather more frequent 
notes, as well as by appendix C, that between my very 
untechnical phraseology and Hegel’s elaborate processes 
there is a pretty deliberately planned relation, which the 


Xll 


PREFACE. 


professional student can verify. Schopenhauer, on the 
other hand, very readily lends himself to the method of 
these lectures, and footnotes could in his case, although 
unwillingly, be wholly spared. Both the Hegel and the 
Schopenhauer papers have appeared in the “ Atlantic 
Monthly.” Both are here considerably enlarged. 

That the modern philosophical doctrine of Evolution, 
in its wholeness is, historically speaking, an outcome, and 
not a very remote one, of the Romantic movement, is an 
obvious observation for a student of the history of thought; 
and yet I am not aware that this observation has hitherto 
been frequently made in a form easily accessible to Eng¬ 
lish readers. So important and doubtless permanent an 
acquisition of modern thought as is the theory of evolu- 
lution deserves to be itself understood as a product of a 
genuine and continuous growth, and not as a special crea¬ 
tion of Mr. Spencer, or as the result of any single cata^ 
strophic change such as even the appearance of Darwin’s 
wonderful “Origin of Species.” These things played 
their great part; but the historical motives of the whole 
movement were very deep-lying and manifold. 

Two of my constructive papers in Part II, the tenth and 
the twelfth of the series of lectures, have been entirely 
rewritten, and have never been read at all as lectures in 
their present form. In the eleventh lecture, on Idealism, 
and elsewhere throughout my book I have given promi¬ 
nence to the strictly “ metaphysical ” rather than to what 
is technically called the “ epistemological ” meaning of 
the word idealism itself. The technical reader is familiar 
with the numerous meanings which this well-known word 
has come to possess. In its “epistemological” sense 
idealism involves a theory of the nature of our human 


PREFACE. 


Xlll 


knowledge; and various decidedly different theories are 
called by this name in view of one common feature, 
namely, the stress that they lay upon the “ subjectivity ” 
of a larger or smaller portion of what pretends to be our 
knowledge of things. In this sense Kant’s theory of the 
subjectivity of space and time was called by himself a 
“ Transcendental Idealism.” But in its “ metaphysical ” 
sense, idealism is a theory as to the nature of the real 
world , however we may come to know that nature. Falck- 
enberg, in his “ Geschichte der neueren Philosophic,” p. 
476, defines one very prominent form of metaphysical 
idealism as the “ belief in a spiritual principle at the basis 
of the world, without the reduction of the physical world 
to a mere illusion.” In this sense, as he goes on to say, 
namely in the sense “ that matter is an expression (Pro- 
duht) of the world-spirit, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and 
their allies are together named the idealistic school.” As 
Yaihinger has well remarked, in his admirable essay on 
Kant’s “ Widerlegung des Idealismus ” (p. 95), it is the 
metaphysical and not the epistemological meaning of the 
term “ idealism ” that has been customary in the literature 
since Hegel. This fact every well-informed student will 
have in mind whenever he uses the word without express 
definition. 

The problems of the theory of knowledge exist of 
course in some form for every serious philosopher. The 
analyses suggested by the various forms of “ epistemolo¬ 
gical ” idealism will have, moreover, permanent value for 
the investigator of our knowledge. Every “metaphysi¬ 
cal ” idealism will have been affected in one way or an¬ 
other by such analyses. But to imagine that a “ meta* 
physical ” idealist is as such a person whose principles con- 


XIV 


PREFACE. 


sistently involve the doubt or denial of the existence of 
everything and every one excepting his own finite self, is 
an old and trivial misunderstanding, unworthy of an his¬ 
torical student. A metaphysical idealist will of course 
deal with the problem of the relation of knowledge and 
its object, and will try to get at the nature of the real 
world by means of a solution of this very problem. How 
he may do this I have tried to show in the proper 
place. None the less, a doctrine remains, in the meta¬ 
physical sense, idealistic, if it maintains that the world 
is, in its wholeness, and in all of its real constituent 
parts, a world of mind or of spirit. The opposite of 
an idealist, in this sense, is one who maintains the ulti¬ 
mate existence of wholly unspiritual realities at the basis 
of experience and as the genuine truth of the world — 
such unspiritual realities for instance as an absolute 
“Unknowable,” or, again, as what Hobbes meant by 
“ Body.” The “ epistemological ” problem, that is, the 
question as to how we “ transcend ” the “subjective” in 
our knowledge, exists at the outset of philosophy, in pre¬ 
cisely the same sense for metaphysical realists and for 
their opponents, the metaphysical idealists. Whether and 
how they are to solve this problem depends upon their 
seriousness of philosophical reflection, as well as upon 
what the true solution may turn out to be. My own view 
is that only the metaphysical idealist is in possession of 
a successful solution for the epistemological problem (see 
text, page 382). 

These last remarks are meant mainly for the technical 
reader, to whom, also, appendices B and C are exclusively 
addressed. 

But Lecture XII, on “The World of Description and 


PREFACE. 


XV 


the World of Appreciation,” attempts a statement of cer¬ 
tain general speculations in a form which I feel to have 
its own degree of relative novelty, despite the fact that 
the problems are of the oldest, and that the paper is only 
one effort more to define a 44 double-aspect ” theory of the 
relations of the physical and the moral and aesthetic 
worlds. I hope that the argument of this paper will be 
on the whole accessible to every reader. Despite the 
rapid flight there taken through a very wide region, what 
I present may have for some fellow-students a genuine 
and not wholly momentary suggestiveness. 

My thanks are due for the constant stimulation and 
frequent kindly criticism received from my colleagues 
Professors Palmer and James. In previous publications 
I have more than once had occasion to acknowledge their 
aid, without which all my work would have been impossi¬ 
ble. To repeat such acknowledgment is only to confess 
that the debt to my elder colleagues is as enduring as is 
my wish to make some return. 

Dr. Benjamin Rand, Assistant of the Philosophical De¬ 
partment at Harvard, is responsible for the careful index. 

JOSIAH ROYCE. 


Cambkedge, Massachusetts, Jan. 1, 1892. 











CONTENTS 


LECTURE PAGE 

I. General Introduction.1 


PART I. STUDIES OF THINKERS AND PROBLEMS. 

II. The Periods of Modern Philosophy; Characteristics 
of the First Period ; Illustration by means of 


the Religious Aspect of Spinozism ... ... 27 

III. The Rediscovery of the Inner Life ; From Spinoza to 

Kant T - ",...68 

IY. Kant "7.101 

Y. Fichte .135 

' VI. The Romantic School in Philosophy.164 

VII. Hegel. 190 

VIII. Schopenhauer.228 

IX. The Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution.265 


PART II. SUGGESTIONS OF DOCTRINE. 

X. Nature and Evolution; The Outer World and its 

Paradox. 311 

XI. Reality and Idealism; The Inner World and its 

Meaning. 341 

XII. Physical Law and Freedom; The World of Descrip¬ 
tion and the World of Appreciation. 381 

XIII. Optimism, Pessimism and the Moral Order. 435 

Appendix A. Syllabus of the Lectures. 473 

Appendix B. On Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of 

the Categories. 483 

Appendix C. The Hegelian Theory of Universals . . 492 














































































































THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


LECTURE I. 

GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

In the following course of lectures I shall try to sug¬ 
gest, in a fashion suited to the general student, something 
about the men, the problems, and the issues that seem to 
me most interesting in a limited, but highly representative 
portion of the history of modern philosophy. I under¬ 
take this work with a keen sense of the limitations of my 
time and my powers. I plead as excuse only my desire 
to interest some of my fellow-students in the great con¬ 
cerns of philosophy. 

I. 

The assumption upon which these lectures are based 
is one that I may as well set forth at the very begin¬ 
ning. It is the assumption that Philosophy, in the proper 
sense of the term, is not a presumptuous effort to explain 
the mysteries of the world by means of any superhuman 
insight or extraordinary cunning, but has its origin and 
value in an attempt to give a reasonable account of our 
own personal attitude towards the more serious business 
of life. You philosophize when you reflect critically upon 
what you are actually doing in your world. What you 
are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And life 
involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage. The crit¬ 
ical inquiry into what all these things mean and im¬ 
ply is philosophy. We have our faith in life; we want 



2 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

reflectively to estimate this faith. We feel ourselves in 
a world of law and of significance. Yet why we feel this 
homelike sense of the reality and the worth of our world 
is a matter for criticism. Such a criticism of life, made 
elaborate and thorough-going, is a philosophy. 

If this assumption of mine be well-founded, it follows 
that healthy philosophizing, or thorough-going self-crith 
cism, is a very human and natural business, in - which 
you are all occasionally, if not frequently engaged, and 
for which you will therefore from the start have a certain 
sympathy. Whether we will it or no, we all of us do 
philosophize. The difference between the temperament 
which loves technical philosophy and the temperament 
which can make nothing of so-called metaphysics is 
rather one of degree than of kind. The moral order, the 
evils of life, the authority of conscience, the intentions 
of God, how often have I not heard them discussed, and 
with a wise and critical skepticism, too, by men who sel¬ 
dom looked into books. The professional student of phi¬ 
losophy does, as his constant business, precisely what all 
other people do at moments. In the life of non-meta¬ 
physical people, reflection on destiny and the deepest 
truths of life occupies much the same place as music 
occupies in the lives of appreciative, but much distracted 
amateurs. The constant student of philosophy is merely 
the professional musician of reflective thought. He daily 
plays his scales in the form of what the scoffers call 
“ chopping logic.” He takes, in short, a delight in the 
technical subtleties of his art which makes his enthusiasm 
often incomprehensible to less devoted analysts of life. 
But his love for speculation is merely their own natural 
taste somewhat specialized. He is a sort of miser, secretly 
hoarding up the treasures of reflection which other people 
wear as the occasional ornaments of intercourse, or use as 
a part of the heavier coinage of conversation. If, as non¬ 
professional philosophers, you confine your reflections to 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


3 


moments, the result is perhaps a serious talk with a friend, 
or nothing more noteworthy than an occasional hour of 
meditation, a dreamy glance of wonder, as it were, at 
this whole great and deep universe before you, with its 
countless worlds and its wayward hearts. Such chance 
heart searchings, such momentary communings with the 
universal, such ungrown germs of reflection, would under 
other, circumstances develop into systems of philosophy. 
If you let them pass from your attention you soon forget 
them, and may then even fancy that you have small fond¬ 
ness for metaphysics. But, none the less, all intelligent 
people, even including the haters of metaphysics, are 
despite themselves occasionally metaphysicians. 


ii. 

All this, however, by way of mere opening suggestion. 
What you wish to know further, through this introduc¬ 
tory lecture, is, how this natural tendency to reflect criti¬ 
cally upon life leads men to frame elaborate systems of 
philosophy, why it is that these systems have been so 
numerous and so varied in the past, and whether or no 
it seems to be true, as many hold, that the outcome of all 
this long and arduous labor of the philosophers has so 
far been nothing but doubtful speculation and hopeless 
variety of opinion. I suppose that a student who knows 
little as yet of the details of philosophic study feels as 
his greatest difficulty, when he approaches the topic for 
the first time, the confusing variety of the doctrines of 
the philosophers, joined as it is with the elaborateness 
and the obscurity that seem so characteristic of technical 
speculation. So much labor, you say, and all thus far 
in vain! For if the thinkers really aimed to bring to 
pass an agreement amongst enlightened persons about the 
great truths that are to be at the basis of human life, how 
sadly, you will say, they seemed to have failed! How 
monstrous on the one hand their toils! Hegel’s eighteen 


4 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


volumes of published books and of posthumously edited 
lecture notes are but a specimen of what such men have 
produced. A prominent English philosopher was flip¬ 
pantly accused, a few years since, in a gay and irrespon¬ 
sible volume of reminiscences, of having been the writer 
of books that, as the scoffing author in substance said, 
“fill several yards on the shelves of our libraries.” The 
prominent philosopher indignantly responded, in a letter 
addressed to a literary weekly. “ His critic,” said he, 
“ was recklessly inaccurate.” As a fact his own collected 
works, set side by side on a shelf, cover a little less than 
two feet! How vast the toil, then, and on the other hand, 
to what end? A distinguished German student of the 
history of philosophy, Friedrich Albert Lange, upon one 
occasion, wrote these words: “ Once for all we must defi¬ 
nitely set aside the claim of the metaphysicians, of what¬ 
ever school and tendency, that their deductions are such 
as forbid any possible strife, or that if you only first thor¬ 
oughly come into possession of every detail of some system 
six fat volumes long, then, and not till then, you will rec¬ 
ognize with wonder how each and every individual conclu¬ 
sion was sound and clear.” Does not this assertion of 
Lange’s, this definitive setting aside of the claim of the 
metaphysicians, seem warranted by the facts ? What one 
of these systems, six fat volumes long, has ever satisfied in 
its entirety any one but the master who wrote it, and the 
least original and thoughtful of his pupils ? What so 
pathetic, then, in this history of scholarly production, as 
this voluminous and systematic unpersuasiveness of the 
philosophers ? They aimed, each one in his own private 
way, at the absolute, and so, if they failed, they must, 
you will think, have failed utterly. Each one raised, all 
alone, his own temple to his own god, declared that he, the 
first of men, possessed the long-sought truth, and under¬ 
took to initiate the world into his own mysteries. Hence 
it is that so many temples lie in ruins and so many images 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


5 


of false gods are shattered to fragments. I put the ease 
thus strongly against the philosophers, because I am 
anxious to have you comprehend from the start how we 
are to face this significant preliminary difficulty of our 
topic. It may be true that the philosophers deal with 
life, and that, too, after a fashion known and occasionally 
tried by all of us. But is not their dealing founded upon 
vain pretense ? How much better, you may say, to live 
nobly than to inquire thus learnedly and ineffectually into 
the mysteries of life ? As the 44 Imitation of Christ ” so 
skillfully states the case against philosophy, speaking 
indeed from the point of view of simple faith, but using- 
words that doubters, too, can understand, 44 What doth it 
profit thee to enter into deep discussion concerning the 
Holy Trinity, if thou lack humility, and be thus displeas¬ 
ing to the Trinity ? For verily it is not deep words that 
make a man holy and upright. I had rather feel contri¬ 
tion than be skillful in the definition thereof.” And 
again, 44 Tell me now where are all those masters and 
teachers, whom thou knewest well, when they were yet 
with you, and flourished in learning? Their stalls are 
now filled by others, who perhaps never have one thought 
concerning them. Whilst they lived they seemed to be 
somewhat, but now no one speaks of them. Oh, how 
quickly passeth the glory of the world away ! Would 
that their life and knowledge had agreed together ! For 
then would they have read and inquired unto good pur¬ 
pose.” Or once again, and this time in the well-known 
words of Fitzgerald’s 44 Omar Khayyam ” stanzas : — 

“ Why all the Saints and Sages who discussed 
Of the two worlds so learnedly are thrust 
Like foolish prophets forth. Their words to Scorn 
Are scattered, and their mouths are stopt with dust.” 

Well, if such is the somewhat portentous case against 
philosophy, what can we say for philosophy? I answer 
first, that the irony of fate treats all human enterprises in 


6 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


precisely this way, if one has regard to the immediate 
intent of the men engaged in them. Philosophy is not 
alone in missing her directly sought aim. But true success 
lies often in serving ends that were higher than the ones 
we intended to serve. Surely no statesman. ever founded 
an enduring social order; nay, one may add that no 
statesman ever produced even temporarily the precise 
social order that he meant to found. No poet ever gave 
us just the song that in his best moments he had meant 
and hoped to sing. No human life ever attained the ful¬ 
fillment of the glorious dreams of its youth. And as for 
passing away, and being forgotten, and having one’s mouth 
stopped with dust, surely one is not obliged to be either a 
saint or a sage to have that fate awaiting one. But still 
the saints and sages are not total failures, even if they 
are forgotten. There was an enduring element about 
them. They did not wholly die. 

In view of all this, what we need to learn concerning 
philosophy is, not whether its leaders have in any sense 
failed or not, but whether its enterprise has been essen¬ 
tially a worthy one, one through which the human spirit 
has gained; whether the dark tower before which these 
Rolands have ended their pilgrimage has contained trea¬ 
sures in any way worthy of their quest. For a worthy 
quest always leaves good traces behind it, and more trea¬ 
sures are won by heroes than they visibly bring home in 
their own day. A more careful examination of the true 
office of philosophy may serve to show us, in fact, both 
why final success in it has been unattainable and why the 
partial successes have been worth the cost. Let such an 
examination be our next business. 

ill. 

The task of humanity, to wit, the task of organizing 
here on earth a worthy social life, is in one sense a hope¬ 
lessly complex one. There are our endlessly numerous 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


7 


material foes, our environment, our diseases, our weak¬ 
nesses. There are amongst us men ourselves, our rival¬ 
ries, our selfish passions, our anarchical impulses, our 
blindness, our weak wills, our short and careful lives. 
These things all stand in the way of progress. For prog¬ 
ress, for organization, for life, for spirituality, stand, as 
the best forces, our healthier social instincts, our cour¬ 
age, our endurance, and our insight. Civilization depends 
upon these. How hopeless every task of humanity, were 
not instinct often on the side of order and of spirituality. 
How quick would come our failure, were not courage and 
endurance ours. How blindly chance would drive us, did 
we not love insight for its own sake, and cultivate con¬ 
templation even when we know not yet what use we can 
make of it. And so, these three, if you will, to wit, 
healthy instinct, enduring courage, and contemplative in¬ 
sight, rule the civilized world. He who wants life to pros¬ 
per longs to have these things alike honored and cultivated. 
They are brethren, these forces of human spirituality; they 
cannot do without one another; they are all needed. 

Well, what I have called contemplative insight, that 
disposition and power of our minds whereby we study 
and enjoy truth, expresses itself early and late, as you 
know, in the form of a searching curiosity about our world 
and about life, a curiosity to which you in vain endeavor 
to set bounds. As the infant that studies its fist in the 
field of vision does not know as yet why this curiosity 
about space and about its own movements will be of ser¬ 
vice to it, so throughout life there is something unpracti¬ 
cal, wayward, if so you choose to call it, in all our curious 
questionings concerning our world. The value of higher 
insight is seldom immediate. Science has an element 
of noble play about it. It is not the activity, it is the 
often remote outcome of science, that is of practical ser¬ 
vice. Insight is an ally of the moral nature of man, an 
ally of our higher social instincts, of our loyalty, of our 


8 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


courage, of our devotion; but the alliance is not always 
one intended directly by the spirit of curious inquiry 
itself. A singular craft of our nature links the most 
theoretical sorts of inquiry by unexpected ties with men’s 
daily business. One plays with silk and glass and amber, 
with kites that one flies beneath thunder clouds, with 
frogs’ legs and with acids. The play is a mere expression 
of a curiosity that former centuries might have called idle. 
But the result of this play recreates an industrial world. 
And so it is everywhere with our deeper curiosity. There 
is a sense in which it is all superfluous. Its immediate 
results seem but vanity. One could surely live without 
them; yet for the future, and for the spiritual life of man¬ 
kind, these results are destined to become of vast import. 
Without this cunning contrivance of our busy brains, 
with their tireless curiosity and their unpractical wonder- 
ings, what could even sound instinct and the enduring 
heart have done to create the world of the civilized man ? 

Of all sorts of curiosity one of the most human and 
the most singular is the reflective curiosity whose highest 
expression is philosophy itself. This form of curiosity 
scrutinizes our own lives, our deepest instincts, our most 
characteristic responses to the world in which we live, our 
typical “ reflex actions.” It tries to bring us to a self- 
consciousness as to our temperaments. Our tempera¬ 
ments, our instincts, are in one sense fatal. We cannot 
directly alter them. What philosophy does is to find 
them out, to bring them to the light, to speak in words 
the very essence of them. And so the historical office of 
the greatest philosophers has always been to reword, as it 
were, the meaning and the form of the most significant 
life, temperaments, and instincts of their own age. As 
man is social, as no man lives alone, as your temperament 
is simply the sum total of your social “ reflex actions,” is 
just your typical bearing towards your fellows, the great 
philosopher, in reflecting on his own deepest instincts and 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 9 

faiths, inevitably describes, in the terms of his system, the 
characteristic attitude of his age and people. So, for in¬ 
stance, Plato and Aristotle, taken together, express for us, 
in their philosophical writings, the essence of the highest 
Greek faith and life. The Greek love of the beautiful 
and reverence for the state, the Greek union of intellec¬ 
tual freedom with conventional bondage to the forms of 
politics and of religion, the whole Greek attitude towards 
the universe, in so far as the Athens of that age could 
embody it, are made articulate in enduring form in the 
speculations of these representative men. . They con¬ 
sciously interpret this Hellenic life, — they do also more : 
they criticise it. Plato especially is in some of his work 
a fairly destructive analyst of his nation’s faith. And 
yet it is just this faith, incorporated as it was into his 
own temperament, bred into his every fibre, that he must 
needs somehow express in his doctrine. And now per¬ 
haps you may already see why there is of necessity no¬ 
thing absolute, nothing final, about much that a Plato 
himself may have looked upon as absolute and as final in 
his work. Greek life was not all of human life; Greek 
life was doomed to pass away; Greek instincts and limi¬ 
tations could not be eternal. The crystal heavens that 
the Greek saw above him were indeed doomed to be rolled 
up like a scroll, and the elements of his life were certain 
to pass away in fervent heat. But then, into all nobler 
future humanity, Greek life was certain to enter, as a 
factor, as a part of its civilized instincts, as an ennobling 
passion in its artistic production, as a moment of its spir¬ 
ituality. And therefore, too, Plato’s philosophy, doomed 
in one sense not to be absolute or final, has its part, as a 
fact, in your own reflection to-day, and would have its 
part in the absolute philosophical estimate of the highest 
human life if ever we attained that estimate. If philoso¬ 
phy criticises, estimates, and to that end rewords life, if 
the great philosopher expresses in his system the most 


10 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


characteristic faiths and passions of his age, then indeed 
the limitation of the age will be in a sense the limitation 
of the philosophy; and with the life whose temperament 
it reflectively embodied the philosophy will pass away. 
It will pass away, but it will not be lost. A future hu¬ 
manity will, if civilization healthily progresses, inherit the 
old kingdom, and reembody the truly essential and immor¬ 
tal soul of its old life. This new humanity, including in 
itself the spirit of the old, will need something, at least, 
of the old philosophy to express in reflective fashion its 
own attitude towards the universe. This something that 
it needs of the old philosophy may not be that which the 
philosopher had himself imagined to be his most absolute 
possession. Like the statesman, he will have builded 
better than he knew. As Caesar’s Roman empire had for 
its destiny not to exclude the Germans, as Caesar had 
driven out Ariovistus, but to civilize and to Christianize 
them, and finally to pass in great part over to their keep¬ 
ing, so Plato’s philosophy had for its office to suggest 
thoughts that Christianity afterwards made the common 
treasure of the very humanity that his mind would have 
regarded as hopelessly barbarian. No, the philosopher’s 
work is not lost when, in one sense, his system seems to 
have been refuted by death, and when time seems to have 
scattered to scorn the words of his dust-filled mouth. 
His immediate end may have been unattained; but thou¬ 
sands of years may not be long enough to develop for 
humanity the full significance of his reflective thought. 

Insight, this curious scrutiny of ours into the truth, 
keeps here, as you will see, its immediately unpractical, 
its ultimately significant character. There is indeed a 
sense in which life has no need of the philosopher. He 
does not invent life, nor does he lead in its race ; he 
follows after; he looks on ; he is no prophet to inspire 
men; he has a certain air of the playful about him. 
Plato, in a famous passage, makes sport of the men of the 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


11 


world, who are driven by business, who are oppressed by 
the law courts, whose only amusement is evil gossip about 
their neighbors. The philosopher, on the contrary, ac¬ 
cording to Plato, has infinite leisure, and accordingly 
thinks of the infinite, but does not know who his next 
neighbor is, and never dreams of the law courts, or of 
finishing his business at any fixed hour. His life is a sort 
of artistic game ; his are not the passions of the world; 
his is the reflection that comprehends the world. The 
Thracian servant maids laugh at him, as the one in the 
story laughed at Thales, because he stares at the heavens, 
and hence occasionally falls into wells. But what is he 
in the sight of the gods, and what are the servant maids ? 
When they are some day asked to look into the heavens, 
and to answer concerning the truth, what scorn will not 
be their lot ? After some such fashion does Plato seek to 
glorify the contemplative separation from the pettiness of 
life which shall give to the philosopher his freedom. And 
yet, as we know, this freedom, this sublime playfulness, 
of even a Plato, does not suggest the real justification of 
his work. This game of reflection is like all the rest of 
our insight, indirectly valuable because from it all there 
is a return to life possible, and in case of a great thinker 
like Plato, certain to occur. The coming humanity shall 
learn from the critic who, standing indeed outside of life, 
embodied in his reflection the meaning of it. 

Thus far, then, my thought has been simply this. 
Humanity depends, for its spirituality and its whole civili¬ 
zation, upon faiths and passions that are in the first place 
instinctive, inarticulate, and in part unconscious. The 
philosopher tries to formulate and to criticise these in¬ 
stincts. What he does will always have a two-fold limi¬ 
tation. It will, on the one hand, be criticism from the 
point of view of a single man, of a single age, of a single 
group of ideals, as Plato or Aristotle embodied the faith 
of but one great age of Greek life, and did that from a 


12 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


somewhat private and personal point of view. This first 
necessary limitation of the philosopher’s work makes his 
system less absolute, less truthful, less final than he had 
meant it to be. Another humanity will have a new faith, 
a new temperament, and in so far will need a new phi¬ 
losophy. Only the final and absolute humanity, only the 
ultimate and perfect civilization, would possess, were such 
a civilization possible on earth, the final and absolute 
philosophy. But this limitation, as we have seen, while 
it dooms a philosopher to one kind of defeat, does n’t 
deprive his work of worth. His philosophy is capable of 
becoming and remaining just as permanently significant 
as is his civilization and its temperament; his reflective 
work will enter into future thought in just the same fash¬ 
ion as the deeper passions of his age will beget the spirit¬ 
ual temper of those who are to come after. 

There remains as second limitation, so we have seen, 
the always seemingly unfruitful critical attitude of the 
philosopher. He speculates, but does not prophesy; he 
criticises, but does not create. Yet this limitation he 
shares with all theory, with all insight; and the limita¬ 
tion is itself only partial and in great measure illusory. 
Criticism means self-consciousness, and self-consciousness 
means renewed activity on a higher plane. The reflective 
play of one age becomes the passion of another. Plato 
creates Utopias, and the Christian faith of Europe after¬ 
wards gives them meaning. Contemplation gives birth to 
future conduct, and so the philosopher also becomes, in 
his own fashion, a world-builder. 


IV. 

But now, having said so much for the philosopher, I 
may venture to say yet more, that if his work is not lost 
in so far as it enters into the life of the humanity which 
comes after him, there is yet another and a deeper sense 
in which his labor is not in vain. For truth is once for 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


13 


all manifold, and especially is the truth about man’s rela¬ 
tion to the universe manifold. The most fleeting pas¬ 
sion, if so be it is only deep and humane, may reveal to 
us some aspect of truth which no other moment of life 
can fully express. I know how difficult it is to compre¬ 
hend that seemingly opposing assertions about the world 
may, in a deeper sense, turn out to be equally true. I 
must leave to later discussions a fuller illustration of how, 
for instance, the optimist, who declares this world to be 
divine and good, and the pessimist, who finds in our finite 
world everywhere struggle and sorrow, and who calls it 
all evil, may be, and in fact are, alike right, each in his 
own sense ; or of how the constructive idealist, who de¬ 
clares all reality to be the expression of divine ideals, and 
the materialist, who sees in nature only matter in motion 
and law absolute, may be but viewing the same truth from 
different sides. All this, I say, will be touched upon 
hereafter. What I here want to suggest is that the truth 
about this world is certainly so manifold, so paradoxical, 
so capable of equally truthful and yet seemingly opposed 
descriptions, as to forbid us to declare a philosopher 
wrong in his doctrine merely because we find it easy to 
make plausible a doctrine that at first sight appears to 
conflict with his own. Young thinkers always find refu¬ 
tation easy, and old doctrines not hard to transcend ; and 
yet what if the soul of the old doctrines should be true 
just because the new doctrines seemingly oppose, but 
actually complete them ? Our reflective insights, in fol¬ 
lowing our life, will, find now this, now that aspect of 
things prominent. What if all the aspects should con¬ 
tain truth ? What if our failure thus far to find and to 
state the absolute philosophy were due to the fact, not 
that all the philosophies thus far have been essentially 
false, but that the truth is so wealthy as to need not only 
these, but yet other and future expressions to exhaust its 
treasury ? I speak thus far tentatively and vaguely. I 


14 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


must illustrate a little, although at best I can thus far 
only suggest. 

Some people have a fashion of recording their reflective 
moments just as they happen to come. If such persons 
chance to be poets, the form of the record is often the 
thoughtful lyric. And the thoughtful lyric poem usually 
possesses the very quality which made Aristotle call 
poetry a “ more philosophical ” portrayal of human life 
than history. It is indeed marvelous how metaphysical 
a great poem of passion almost always is. The passion 
of the moment makes its own universe, flashes back like 
a jewel the light of the far-off sun of truth, but colors 
this reflected light with its own mysterious glow. “ You 
are, you shall be mine,” cries the strong emotion to the 
earth and to the whole choir of heaven, and the briefest 
poem may contain a sort of philosophic scheme of the 
entire creation. The scheme is sometimes as false as the 
passion portrayed is transient; but it is also often as true 
as the passion is deep, and whoever has once seen how 
variously and yet how significantly the moods expressed 
in great poems interpret both our life and the reality of 
which our life forms part, will not be likely to find that 
philosophical systems are vain merely because the phi¬ 
losophers, like the poets, differ. In fact the reason why 
there is as yet no one final philosophy may be very 
closely allied to the reason why there is no final and 
complete poem. Life is throughout a complicated thing ; 
the truth of the spirit remains an inexhaustible treasure 
house of experience; and hence no individual experi¬ 
ence, whether it be the momentary insight of genius 
recorded in the lyric poem, or the patient accumulation 
of years of professional plodding through the problems of 
philosophy, will ever fully tell all the secrets which life 
has to reveal. 

It is for just this reason, so I now suggest, that when 
you study philosophy, you have to be tolerant, receptive, 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


15 


willing to look at the world from many sides, fearless as 
to the examination of what seem to be even dangerous 
doctrines, patient in listening to views that look even ab¬ 
horrent to common sense. It is useless to expect a simple 
and easy account of so paradoxical an affair as this our 
universe and our life. When you first look into philoso¬ 
phy you are puzzled and perhaps frightened by those 
manifold opinions of the philosophers of which we have 
thus far had so much to say. “ If they, who have thought 
so deeply, differ so much,” you say, “ then what hope is 
there that the truth can ever be known ? ” But if you 
examine further you find that this variety, better studied, 
is on its more human side largely an expression of the 
liveliness and individuality of the spiritual temperaments 
of strong men. The truth is not in this case “in the 
middle.” The truth is rather “ the whole.” Let me 
speak at once in the terminology of a special philosophical 
doctrine, and say that the world spirit chose these men 
as his voices, — these men and others like them, and that 
in fact he did so because he had all these things to voice. 
Pardon this fashion of speech ; I shall try to make it 
clearer hereafter. Their experience then, let me say, is, 
in its apparently confusing variety, not so much a seeing 
of one dead reality from many places, but rather a critical 
rewording of fragments of the one life which it is the des¬ 
tiny of man to possess and to comprehend. These war¬ 
ring musicians strike mutually discordant tones. But let 
each sing his song by himself, and the whole group of 
Meistersanger shall discourse to you most excellent music. 
For grant that the philosophers are all in fact expressing 
not dead truth, but the essence of human life, then be¬ 
cause this life is many-sided, the individual expressions 
cannot perfectly agree. It is the union of many such 
insights that will be the one true view of life. Or again, 
using the bolder phrases, let us say that all these thinkers 
are trying to comprehend a little of the life of the one 


16 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

World Spirit who lives and moves in all things. Then 
surely this life, which in our world needs both the ante¬ 
lopes and the tigers to embody its endless vigor, that life 
which the frost and cold, the ice and snow, do bless and 
magnify, is not a life which any one experience can ex¬ 
haust. All the philosophers are needed, not merely to 
make jarring assertions about it, but to give us embodi¬ 
ments now of this, now of that fragment of its wealth 
and its eternity. And in saying this I don’t counsel you 
in your study of philosophy merely to jumble together all 
sorts of sayings of this thinker and of that, and then to 
declare, as makers of eclectic essays and of books of ex¬ 
tracts love to say, “ This is all somehow great and true.” 
What I mean is that, apart from the private whims and 
the non-essential accidents of each great philosopher, his 
doctrine will contain for the critical student an element 
of permanent truth about life, a truth which in its isola¬ 
tion may indeed contradict the view of his equally worthy 
co-workers, but which, in union, in synthesis, in vital con¬ 
nection with its very bitterest opposing doctrines, may 
turn out to be an organic portion of the genuine treasure 
of humanity. Nobody hates more than I do mere eclec¬ 
ticism, mere piecing together of this fragment and that 
for the bare love of producing fraudulent monuments of 
philosophic art. But the fact is that, frauds aside, the 
god-like form of truth exists for us men, as it were, in 
statuesque but scattered remnants of the once perfect 
marble. Through the whole ruined world, made desolate 
by the Turks of prejudice and delusion, the philosophers 
wander, finding here and there one of these bits of the 
eternal and genuine form of the goddess. Though I hate 
fraudulent restorations of a divine antiquity, still I know 
that, notwithstanding all, these fragments do somehow 
belong together, and that the real truth is no one of the 
bits, but is the whole goddess. What we who love phi¬ 
losophy long for is no piece-work, but that matchless 
whole itself. 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


IT 


The kind of philosophical breadth of view for which I 
am now pleading is not, I assure you, the same as mere 
vagueness, merely lazy toleration, of all sorts of conflict¬ 
ing opinions. Nobody is more aware than I am that the 
errors and false theories of the philosophers are facts as 
real as are the manifold expressions which they give to 
truth. I am not pleading for inexactness or undecisive¬ 
ness of thought. What I am really pleading for, as you 
will see in the sequel, is a form of philosophic reflection 
that leads to a very definite and positive theory of the 
universe itself, the theory, namely, which I have just sug¬ 
gested, a theory not at all mystical in its methods, nor yet, 
in its results, really opposed to the postulates of science, 
or to the deeper meaning at the heart of common sense. 
This theory is that the whole universe, including the 
physical world also, is essentially one live thing, a mind, 
one great Spirit, infinitely wealthier in his experiences 
than we are, but for that very reason to be comprehended 
by us only in terms of our own wealthiest experience. I 
don’t assume the existence of such a life in the universe 
because I want to be vague or to seem imaginative. The 
whole matter appears to me, as you will hereafter see, to 
be one of exact thought. The result, whatever it shall be, 
must be reached in strict accord with the actual facts of 
experience and the actual assumptions of human science. 
The truth, whenever we get it, must be as hard and fast 
as it is manifold. But the point is that if the universe 
is a live thing, a spiritual reality, we, in progressing to¬ 
wards a comprehension of its nature, must needs first 
comprehend our own life. And in doing this we shall 
pass through all sorts of conflicting moods, theories, doc¬ 
trines ; and these doctrines, in the midst of their conflict 
and variety, will express, in fragmentary ways, aspects of 
the final doctrine, so that, as I said, the truth will be the 
whole. 


18 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Y. 

Thus far I have spoken of the various opinions and of 
the general human significance of the philosophers. I 
called attention, also, a little while since, to the appa¬ 
rently unpractical attitude that they assume towards life. 
In this connection I have already suggested that their 
criticism of life has often its destructive side. In these 
present days, when philosophy is frequently so negative, 
it is precisely this destructive, this skeptically critical 
character of philosophy, that to the minds of many con¬ 
stitutes its best-known character, and its most obvious 
danger. It is not mine to defend recent philosophy from 
the charge of being often cruelly critical. To many of 
us it might, indeed, in pity be said: “ Mayest thou never 
know what thou art.” I have myself more than once felt 
the pang, as I have studied philosophy, of finding out to 
my sorrow what I am. I have, therefore, many times 
lamented that philosophy is indeed often so sternly and so 
negatively critical of many things that our hearts have 
loved and prized. If any one fears the pangs of self-con¬ 
sciousness, it is not my office to counsel him to get it. 
But I must, indeed, point out here that when a wise phi¬ 
losophy is destructive, the true fault lies not with the 
critic who finds the wound in our faith, but with the faith 
that has secretly nursed its own wounds in unconscious¬ 
ness. Philosophy, in the true sense of that word, never 
destroys an ideal that is worth preserving. Coming to 
consciousness of yourself can only bring to light weakness 
in case the weakness already exists in you. If you fear, 
I say, the pang of such a discovery, — and, as I can assure 
you, the pang is often keen, — then do not try philosophy. 
For the rest, however, this relation of philosophy to posi¬ 
tive faith is one whereof I may speak in yet a very few 
words before I leave it. Let me point out in what sense 
philosophy is critical, but in what sense also it can hope 
to be constructive. 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


19 


Of course philosophy, as thus far described, is sure to 
begin at once, if it can, with inquiries into the largest and 
most significant instincts, the deepest faiths of humanity. 
These, when it discovers them, it will single out and criti¬ 
cise. Hence, indeed, the philosophers are always talking 
of such problems as duty and God. Hence they inquire 
how we can come to know whether there is any external 
world at all, and, if so, whether this world is to be treated 
as dead matter, or as live mind. Hence they are curious 
to study our ideas of natural law, of moral freedom, of 
time, of space, of causation, of self. They pry into the 
concerns of faith as if these were theirs by divine right. 
They are not only prying, they are on one side of their 
activity merciless, skeptical, paradoxical, inconsiderate. 
They don’t ask, it would seem, how dear your faith is to 
you; they analyze it, as they would the reflex action of a 
starfish, or the behavior of a pigeon ; and then they try 
to estimate faith objectively, as an editor looks critically 
at a love-sonnet which somebody has sent him (a sonnet 
written with the author’s heart’s blood), and weighs it 
coolly and cruelly before he will consent to find it avail¬ 
able. Even so the philosopher has his standard of the 
availability of human faiths. You have to satisfy this 
with your creed before he will approve you. All this 
sometimes seems cynical, just as the editor’s coolness may 
become provoking. But then, as you know, the editor, 
with all his apparent cruelty, is a man of sympathy and 
of more than negative aims. He has to consider what he 
calls availability, because he has his critical public to 
please. And the philosopher — he, too, has to be critical 
and to seem cruel, because he also has a public to please 
with his estimate ; and his chosen public ought to be no 
less than the absolute judge, the world spirit himself, in 
whose eyes the philosopher can find favor only if he be able 
to sift the truth from the error. That is why he is rigid. 
Nothing but an absolute critical standard ought to satisfy 


20 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


him, because he wants nothing short of the truth itself. 
He will fail to get it, but then, as I have said, we all of us 
fail more or less in some career or other; and the meta¬ 
physician, with his one talent of critical estimate, must do 
what he can. 

Yet I hasten to correct this seemingly too lifeless a 
picture of the philosopher’s cruel analysis of passion, by 
a reference to the thoughts upon which I have already 
dwelt. From the often disheartening difficulties and in¬ 
completeness of the human search for absolute truth, we 
who read philosophy continually find ourselves returning, 
hand to hand with the author himself, to the world of the 
concrete passions which he criticises. We find this world 
at each return more fair and yet more serious, because we 
know it better. The sacred tears that were shed in it are 
none the less sacred because we have been trying to find 
out from the critic what they meant. Their mystery, 
long pried into, becomes even the dearer for that. The 
criticised passions become like old letters, treasured up by 
a lover after his dear friend’s death, — often read and re¬ 
read, until the reader has looked at every curve to know 
why it was traced in just this way. He has found out, or 
not, — still the search was consoling. So, too, we have 
analyzed our long past life ; and now the more confidently 
may we henceforth live in the new life before us. We 
have criticised, so much the more cheerfully may we en¬ 
joy. I once saw something of a pair of literary lovers, 
friends of mine, who, being a trifle reflective, were prone 
to amuse themselves by affecting to treat each other’s pro¬ 
ductions with a certain editorial coldness and severity of 
critical estimate. They wrote poems to each other, sup¬ 
pressing or changing of course the names, and then each, 
wholly ignoring whom this poem might be intended to 
mean, used to pick the other’s work to pieces with an air 
of gentle and pathetic disdain. “ Here the sentiment 
somehow failed to justify its object, being expressed un- 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


21 


musically. There the experiment was a clever one, but 
the lines were such as a dispassionate observer (like either 
of us who should happen not to be the author) could not 
approve, might even smile at.” These people never pre¬ 
cisely quarreled, to my knowledge, at least over their lit¬ 
erary criticism. I was not able to make out altogether 
why they did this sort of thing, but, so far as I could dis¬ 
cover, they both liked it, and were the better lovers for it. 
I conjecture that their delight must have resembled the 
kind of joy that philosophical students take in analyzing 
life. Let me admit frankly: it is indeed the joy, if you 
like, of playing cat and mouse with your dearest other 
self. It is even somewhat like the joy, if so you choose to 
declare, which infants take in that primitive form of hide 
and seek that is suited to their months. “ Where is my 
truth, my life, my faith, my temperament ? ” says the phi¬ 
losopher. And if, some volumes further on in the expo¬ 
sition of his system, he says, “ Oh! there it is,” the healthy 
babies will be on his side in declaring that such reflections 
are not wholly without their rational value. But why do I 
thus apparently degrade speculation by again deliberately 
comparing it with a game ? Because, I answer, in one 
sense, all consciousness is a game, a series of longings and 
of reflections which it is easy to call superfluous if wit¬ 
nessed from without. The justification of consciousness 
is the having of it. And this magnificent play of the 
spirit with itself, this infantile love of rewinning its own 
wealth ever anew through deliberate loss, through seek¬ 
ing, and through joyous recognition, what is this, indeed, 
but the pastime of the divine life itself? We enter into 
the world of the spirit just when even the tragedy of life 
becomes for our sight as much a divine game as a divine 
tragedy, when we know that the world is not only serious, 
terrible, cruel, but is also a world where a certain grim 
humor of the gods is at home ; when we see in it a world, 
too, where a serene and childlike confidence is justified, a 


22 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


world where courage is in place as well as reverence, and 
sport as well as seriousness; where, above all,the genius of 
reflection, expressing at once vast experience of life and a 
certain infantile cheerfulness or even sportiveness of mood, 
rightfully lets itself loose in the freest form, now assum¬ 
ing a stern and critical air, now demurely analyzing, as 
if there were nothing else to do, now prying into men’s 
hearts like a roguish boy playing with precious jewels, 
now pretending that all faith is dead, now serenely de¬ 
monstrating unexpected truths, and, last of all, plunging 
back again into life with the shout of them that triumph. 


VI. 

It now behooves me, in conclusion, to say something of 
the relation of a course of lectures like the one herewith 
begun to the technicalities of philosophical study. There 
is a great deal in every noteworthy metaphysical treatise 
which can be grasped only by special study. I shall 
make little attempt to transgress into this more technical 
field during these lectures. I must, indeed, discuss topics 
which only a rare kindliness on your part can make clearly 
comprehensible, for they are, once for all, serious and diffi¬ 
cult, but I do not understand it to be the purpose of our 
present discourse to give what in the University would be 
called an Introduction to the literature of metaphysics 
proper. The only question that can arise about such a 
proceeding as I here propose is, of course, a question as 
to whether it is worth while to separate the general con¬ 
sideration of philosophical tendencies from a more minute 
study of the works of the philosophers. Such a question 
only the outcome can decide. I am aware that it is hard 
to be historically accurate in what I have to say without 
being much more specific than I shall have time to be. I 
must warn you at the outset that a full and fair under¬ 
standing of any great thinker demands a knowledge, both 
of the history of thought in general, and of his own period 


GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 


23 


in particular, which it is very hard, even for the profes¬ 
sional student, after years of study, to attain. All frag¬ 
mentary views, meanwhile, have something of the mislead¬ 
ing about them. Yet, on the other hand, the necessary 
imperfections of a partial expression of the truth never 
ought to discourage us from expressing all the truth that 
we can. The purpose of the subsequent lectures will in 
any case be sufficiently accomplished, if they bring you 
nearer to the throbbing heart of this intense modern 
speculative interest, so that you shall better know that 
warm blood flows in philosophic veins. 

For the rest, I confess to you that, although I myself 
often take a certain personal delight in the mere subtle¬ 
ties of speculation, although I also enjoy at times that 
miserliness which makes the professional student hoard 
up the jewels of reflection for the sake of gloating over 
their mere hardness and glitter, I find always that when 
I come to think of the thing fairly, there is, after all, no 
beauty in a metaphysical system, which does not spring 
from its value as a record of a spiritual experience. I 
love the variety of the philosophers, as I love the variety 
of the thoughtful looks which light up earnest young 
faces. I love all these because they express passion, won¬ 
der, truth. But alas for me if ever I have for profes¬ 
sional reasons to study a book behind whose technical 
subtleties I can catch no glimpse of the manly heart of its 
author. His conclusions may be sound. I shall then 
hate him only the more for that. Error may be dull if 
it chooses ; but there is no artistic blasphemy equal to so 
placing the harp of truth as to make it sound harsh and 
wooden when you strike it fairly. Philosophical books I 
have read, with whose doctrines, as doctrines, I have even 
been forced in great measure to agree; and yet, so life¬ 
less, so bloodless, were their authors, so reptilian were the 
cold and slowly writhing sentences in which their thought 
was expressed, that I have laid down such volumes with a 


24 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

sense of disgrace and rebellion, “ bitterly ashamed,” as a 
friend of mine has expressed the same feeling in my hear¬ 
ing, “ bitterly ashamed to find myself living in a universe 
whose truth could possibly be made so inefficacious and 
uninteresting.” To be sure, in saying all this I am far 
from desiring to make technical metaphysics easy, for the 
study is a laborious one ; and there are many topics in 
logic, in the theory of the sciences, and in ethics, to whose 
comprehension there is no royal road. But then, once 
your eyes opened, and you will indeed find subjects that at 
first seemed dry and inhuman full of life and even )f pas¬ 
sion ; as, for instance, few sciences are in their elemen¬ 
tary truths more enticing to the initiated, more coy and 
baffling to the reflective philosophical student, in fact, 
more romantic, than is the Differential Calculus. But if 
such matters lie far beyond our present field, I mention 
them only to show that even the hardest and least popu¬ 
lar reflective researches are to be justified, in the long- 
run, by their bearings upon life. 


PART I. 


STUDIES OF THINKERS AND PROBLEMS. 







LECTURE II. 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY; CHARACTERIS¬ 
TICS OF THE FIRST PERIOD ; ILLUSTRATION BY MEANS 

OF THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF SPINOZISM. 

Our general purpose in these lectures has now been 
defined. As we pass to the study of certain representa¬ 
tive modern thinkers and problems, the difference between 
our method and that of a text-book, or of a regular course 
of academic lectures on the history of modern thought, 
must be well borne in mind. We wish to select certain 
tendencies especially characteristic of the spirit of modern 
philosophy. We shall therefore lay most stress upon 
what happened in the culminating period of modern 
thought, — that from Kant to Schopenhauer, — and upon 
the problems that seem to me most permanent and signifi¬ 
cant in that period itself. In earlier periods our method 
will be one of the briefest sketching. Later we shall 
become more specific. Of no thinker before Kant shall 
we give any extended account. Several thinkers of first 
rank, such as Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, we shall 
barely mention or wholly ignore. Always, even where we 
are fullest in statement, we shall select those aspects of 
the thinker in question that concern our own undertak¬ 
ing. What this undertaking will lead to will not become 
manifest until, in the second part of our course, we have 
suggested in outline a certain philosophical creed to which 
I wish to direct your attention. 

It is in vain that one seeks, in the history of thought, 
to choose any perfectly satisfactory place of beginning for 


28 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the purpose of a course of lectures like this. Always one 
must run a risk of producing the illusion in your minds 
that the point where he chances to begin is somehow pecu¬ 
liarly significant as a beginning. But always, of course, if 
you should ever hereafter come to look deeper, you would 
find this point of beginning very arbitrary, and what im¬ 
mediately preceded it vastly important for the true under¬ 
standing of the whole matter. My beginning, therefore, 
as I must warn you, will be indeed very arbitrary, just as 
my methods will have to be very different from those of 
a text-book. 

I. 

As to the general scope of our course, modern philoso¬ 
phy, our topic in what follows, is as wealthy and complex 
an evolution in its way as is the life which it depicts. 
What we call modern thought, in these matters, is a very 
recent affair, dating back only to the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury. Since then, however, philosophy has lived through 
several great periods, which for our purpose we may re¬ 
duce to three. 

The first period was one of what we may call natural¬ 
ism, pure and simple. It belongs almost wholly to the 
seventeenth century. The philosophy of this first age 
lived in a world where two things seemed clear: first, 
that nature is full of facts which conform fatally to exact 
and irreversible law, and second, that man lives best under 
a strong, a benevolently despotic civil government. The 
philosophers of this time had left off contemplating the 
heaven of mediaeval piety, and were disposed to deify 
nature. They adored the rigidity of geometrical meth¬ 
ods ; they loved the study of the new physical science, 
which had begun with Galileo. Man they conceived 
as a mechanism. Human emotions, even the loftiest, 
they delighted in explaining by very simple and funda¬ 
mental natural passions. There is often something mer¬ 
ciless and cynical about their analysis of many things 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


29 


sacred in human life. They are cold, formal, systematic, 
at least as to the outward shape of their doctrines. At 
heart, however, they are not without a deep piety of their 
own. The nature which they deify has its magnificent 
dignity. It is no respecter of our sentimentalities; but 
it does embody a certain awful justice. You would pray 
to it in vain ; but you may interrogate it fearlessly, for it 
hides no charmed and magical secrets in its breast which 
an unlucky word might render dangerous to the inquirer. 
It notices no insult; it blasts no curious questioner for 
his irreverence. This nature is a wise nature. Her best 
children are those who labor most patiently to comprehend 
her laws. The weak she crushes; but the thoughtful she 
honors. She knows no miracles ; but her laws are an in¬ 
exhaustible treasure house of resources to the knowing. 
In fact, knowledge of such laws is the chief end of man’s 
life. God is n’t any longer what he had often seemed in 
more clerical ages, — a God that hides himself from the 
natural and unassisted intellect of man. He showed him¬ 
self of old to the Greek geometers, to Euclid, to Archi¬ 
medes. In these days of the seventeenth century he 
unveils new mysteries to the students of physics. In the 
world of such a ruler, fear is out of place ; you may even 
doubt if you will. The incredulous are no longer public 
enemies ; they are merely the learners. Descartes, a rep¬ 
resentative thinker of the century, and the one from whom 
our period is often dated, begins his reflection by doubt¬ 
ing everything. As for the method of escaping from 
doubt, that consists in the use of reason and in the study 
of the facts of experience ; nothing else serves. Revela¬ 
tion you treat with such respect as political and social 
considerations require ; but for philosophy, in this age of 
the seventeenth century, the supernatural has only a sec¬ 
ondary interest, if it has any interest at all. Religious 
conformity is a matter of policy; a noisy atheist would 
be, of course, a cause of scandal, and might even bring 


80 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


philosophy into discredit. Besides, almost every serious 
philosopher of this our first period believes in God as in 
some sense the source of nature. It is, however, not well 
to tell the unlearned too much about what sort of God 
you believe in. The unlearned are gross, still dread 
witches, carry amulets, know nothing of geometry; best 
be cautious of speech to them. Philosophy makes no 
propaganda, appeals to philosophers, lets faith alone. 
Besides, loyalty to the state counsels some measure of 
religious conformity. Hobbes, the great Englishman, 
himself a speculative materialist, and, as I fancy, the 
most well-knit and highly organized thinker in the whole 
history of English philosophy, was clear that whatever a 
man’s opinion might be, it was his duty to submit all 
matters of religious conformity to the judgment of the 
state. “ I submit,” he says in effect somewhere, “ to the 
Church of England, because that is the church ordained 
for me by the will of my sovereign, the king of England.” 
And this confession of Hobbes involves no hypocrisy. It 
is the frankest confession in the world. His conformity 
is openly a conformity to civil laws. Philosophy and reli¬ 
gion are once for all separated. It is a matter of acci¬ 
dent whether the philosopher has or has not a traditional 
creed left him by his philosophy. His thought is no 
longer the handmaid of his faith, as had generally been 
the case with the thinkers of the Middle Ages. But as 
for his faith itself, social and political considerations must 
decide how and in what way he shall give evidence of it 
to his fellows. His very loyalty, his good citizenship, his 
frank benevolence, counsel prudence of speech. 

And here appears again another side of the philosophy 
of this first period. It is a loyal philosophy, a philosophy 
of good citizenship ; it has a great respect for the highest 
political interests of man ; it studies jurisprudence, state¬ 
craft, international law, natural justice; it founds its loy¬ 
alty, indeed, upon reason, makes little of the divine right 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


31 


of kings, loves to declare all men equal, despises tradi¬ 
tion in social matters, throws contempt on the mere cus¬ 
toms of mankind, looks for the sanction of law in the 
eternal and just order of the world, in short seeks most 
distinctly not in the clouds, but here upon earth, for an 
abiding city. Hence, it generally opposes clerical inter¬ 
ference in political matters ; it gives to the kingdom of 
God a naturalistic interpretation, takes no interest in the 
jeweled walls and the pearl gates of a scriptural new 
Jerusalem, but undertakes to build a terrestrial one of its 
own on a geometrical plan of modern devising, a city 
not without foundations, but very sober as to ornamenta¬ 
tion. Better a rational constitution than golden streets. 

Does this first period of modern philosophy, thus very 
rudely outlined as to its most general interests, seem to 
some of you dishearteningly uuspiritual? Then reflect, 
it surely has not pleased God to save his people by an¬ 
archy ; and these who in this recent century, in the age 
when science first grew lusty in its young strength, and 
when the sanctions of medievalism were already partly 
obsolete, spoke the word for the freedom of human reason, 
and the reasonableness of good order, served the spiritual 
necessities of mankind no whit the less because they told 
only part of the truth. What they bequeathed to us was 
a faith in sober realities, a reverence for the dignity of 
the world of law, a love of lucidity, for which we cannot 
thank them too much. As to their deification of nature, 
it was surely the beginning of modern wisdom, an insight 
that whatever God is, he is not far from every one of us, 
a turning away from the mere gazing up into heaven 
after a distant and ascended divine ruler, a sense that if 
the spirit is indeed poured out on earth, you have a right 
to look upon the simplest facts as containing it. These 
men may be cold ; for my part I find a clearness about 
the snowy mountain summits amongst which they live, 
which goes far to compensate for the hardness of the out- 


32 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

lines of their world. That they, too, have a genuine and 
lofty piety to proclaim to us, I shall try to exemplify in 
the case of Spinoza. For nature, also, has its divine side; 
the hard, clear outlines of the mountains stand out, after 
all, against the heavens of God. He who reflects upon 
our human love of clear reason and of sound order reflects 
upon certain of the deepest, though surely not upon the 
hottest, passions of man. And Spinoza, as we shall find, 
knew how to give to this eternal order of nature a mys¬ 
tical and almost romantic glamor. Under the gently 
glowing evening twilight of his peaceful reflection, these 
mountain peaks, if we may yet again strain our figure, 
gleam with an almost ghostly dignity, and seem no longer 
sharp or cruel. Spinoza, like other mystical souls, knows 
of a peace which the world of sense can neither give nor 
take away. This peace he finds in an absorbing contem¬ 
plation of the divine order as eternal and necessary. It 
is of the nature of reason, he says, to regard all things 
under the form of eternity. So regarded, even this pas¬ 
sionate, struggling life of ours seems an apparition of the 
changeless. God is everywhere. The wise man asks no 
happy fortune ; his unalterable fortune it is to love God 
with the same love wherewith God loves himself. 

But the second age of modern philosophy, rejecting 
this sublime indifference to the concerns of the individual 
human being, turned curiously back to the study of the 
wondrous inner world of man’s soul. To deify nature is 
not enough. Man is the most interesting thing in nature, 
and he is not yet deified; nor can he be until we have 
won a true knowledge of his wayward heart. He may be 
a part of nature’s mechanism, or he may not; still, if he 
be a mechanism, he is that most paradoxical of things, a 
knowing mechanism. His knowledge itself, what it is, 
how it comes about, whence he gets it, how it grows, what 
it signifies, how it can be defended against skepticism, 
what it implies, both as to moral truth and as to theoreti- 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


33 


cal truth, — these problems are foremost in the interests 
of the second period of modern thought, whose beginnings 
we can see in Locke, and whose culmination was in the 
philosophic movement that expressed itself, towards the 
close of the eighteenth century, in Kant’s “ Critique of 
Pure Reason.” The early thinkers of this period, Locke, 
the early English moralists, Leibnitz, belong in part to 
the first period, as is always likely to be the case in such 
orderly evolutions. Gradually, attention is turned more 
and more from the outer world to the mind of man. The 
first period had been one of naturalism; the second is one 
of a sort of new humanism. In the first half of the 
eighteenth century this humanism developed the works of 
the great classical representatives of English ethics, as 
well as the idealism of Berkeley. Reflection is now more 
an inner study, an analysis of the mind, than an exami¬ 
nation of the business of physical science. Human reason 
is still the trusted instrument, but it soon turns its criti¬ 
cism upon itself. It distinguishes prejudices from axi¬ 
oms, fears dogmatism, scrutinizes the evidences of faith, 
suspects, or at best has consciously to defend, even the 
apparently irresistible authority of conscience, and so 
comes at length, in the person of the greatest of the Brit¬ 
ish eighteenth century thinkers, David Hume, to a ques¬ 
tioning even of its own capacity to know truth, a doubt¬ 
ing attitude which brings philosophy into a sharp and 
admitted opposition to common sense. At this point, 
however, a new interest begins in Europe. If the age 
was already disposed to self-analysis, Rousseau, with his 
paradoxes and his even pathological love of limitless self¬ 
scrutiny, introduced into this man-loving period a senti¬ 
mental tendency, from which, erelong, came a revival of 
passion, of poetry, and of enthusiasm, whose influence we 
shall never outgrow. Contemporaneous with this influ¬ 
ence was the appearance of the modern romance in its 
early forms. Not much later came the “ Storm and 


34 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Stress ” period of German literature, and by the time this 
had run its course, the French Revolution, overthrowing 
all the mechanical restraints of civilization, demonstrated 
afresh to the world’s outer sense the central importance of 
passion in the whole life of humanity. 

The philosophy of Kant, developing in the quiet soli¬ 
tudes of his professorial studies at Konigsberg, in far 
eastern Prussia, reflected with a most wonderful ingenuity 
the essential interests of the time when all this transfor¬ 
mation was preparing. In 1781, he published his “ Cri¬ 
tique of Pure Reason,” nearly, if not quite, the most 
important philosophical treatise ever written. The essen¬ 
tial doctrine of this book is the thought that man’s nature 
is the real creator of man’s world. It is n’t the external 
world, as such, that is the deepest truth for us at all; it 
is the inner structure of the human spirit which merely 
expresses itself in the visible nature about us. The inter¬ 
est of Kant’s presentation of this paradoxical thought 
lay not so much in the originality of the conception, for 
philosophers never invent fundamental beliefs, and this 
idea of Kant’s is as old as deeper spiritual faith itself ; 
but rather in the cool, reflective, mercilessly critical in¬ 
genuity with which he carries it out. Issued several 
years before the French Revolution, the book seems a sort 
of deliberate justification of the proud consciousness of 
man’s own absolute rights with which, in that mighty 
struggle, the human spirit rose against all external re¬ 
straints, and declared, as we in America had already 
showed men how to do, that the true world for humanity 
is the world which the freeman makes, and that the genu- 
uinely natural order is one which is not external until 
reason decrees that it shall exist. 

And herewith begins what I have ventured to call in 
its wholeness the third period of modern philosophy, a 
period not yet ended. The great thoughts of Kant ruled 
the philosophic reflection of the next fifty years after the 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


35 


appearance of the “ Critique,” with what extravagancies 
and with what excellencies of result we shall in a meas¬ 
ure see hereafter. There is a sense in which this doc¬ 
trine of Kant’s is the very soul of all our modern life, 
not, I repeat, as if the philosopher had invented it, but 
because once for all this is the essentially humane view of 
reality. You can easily make wild and romantic misuse 
of it. But when rightly interpreted, Kant’s world, where 
the inner reason is lord over the outer sense, will prove to 
be as hard and fast a world of fact, of law, and of eter¬ 
nal majesty, as ever the seventeenth century had con¬ 
ceived. At all events, whether we will it or no* in this 
universe of Kant’s philosophy we all still live. 

But the outcome of these fifty years of post-Kantian 
speculation was, after all, an unfinished organization of 
philosophic thought. The undertaking was too vast for 
one generation. After a period of speculative quiescence, 
a period when attention was directed away from philoso¬ 
phy by other human concerns, this, our third period of 
modern thought, has come to see a revival of philosophic 
activity, a revival in the midst of which we now live. To 
the legacy of Kant has been added the wealth of prob¬ 
lems offered to us by recent advances in natural science 
and in the study of the history of humanity. The doc¬ 
trine of evolution, itself no novelty in opinion, has re¬ 
ceived a wholly unlooked-for empirical formulation and 
confirmation. The sciences have grown until no one can 
even remotely hope to overlook their whole field. In con¬ 
sequence, however, external nature has once more gained 
for us an imposing authority which makes us in many 
ways sympathize afresh with the pure naturalism of the 
seventeenth century. Man we once more see to be, not 
merely the sentimental rebel and creative hero of Rous¬ 
seau and the romanticists, not merely the organ of the 
world-forming reason of the Kantian schools, but also, 
and just as truly, the mechanism which the seventeenth 


36 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


century declared him to be. How can he be both these 
things, that is, both natural and spiritual ? How can he 
have sprung from an animal ancestry, yes, ultimately from 
dead matter, and yet be the embodiment, the organ of the 
absolute reason ? How can he at once be part of the spirit 
whose live thinking dreams out this whole frame of things, 
and yet he himself the slave of the very order of nature 
which this dream creates ? How can he, this mere me¬ 
chanism, this creature of nerves, this mortal thing whose 
brain secretes thought, be also, as Kant made him, the 
very source of the laws of nature themselves ? How com¬ 
prehend this paradox? Well, I answer, after all, it is 
the ancient paradox of the double nature of man. It 
would be unpardonably absurd even to mention such a 
strange problem, were it not so real, so pertinacious, so 
every day a matter, were it not absolutely forced on us 
afresh by every new word of modern science, as by every 
old word of the devotional books. And this problem, I 
insist, is now in the forefront of speculation as it never 
was before : in what sense, with what prospect of solu¬ 
tion, with what beauty of statement, with what depth of 
significance, with what manifold illustration in facts, with 
what passionate longing of inquiry, I should be glad, in¬ 
deed, if I could hope to express in the subsequent lectures 
of this course. And so, for the first, our rude sketch 
is before us. How much I desire to suggest its signifi¬ 
cance, let one brief illustration suffice to show ere I go 
further. 

There is a certain earlier and idealistic drama of Ibsen’s 
which the current public interest in that remarkable 
poet seems still disposed to neglect altogether. I mean 
the drama entitled “ Emperor and Galilean.” In this 
play the author introduces the apostate Emperor Julian, 
struggling to replace the kingdom whose authority is not 
of this world, by an imperial power whose aims and 
sanctions shall be earthly, naturalistic, human, and whose 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


37 


ideals sliall not look beyond any man’s sepulchre. When 
the power of the romantic apostate is already on the 
wane, he converses, in one scene, with his confidential ad¬ 
viser, the heathen seer and mystic, Maximos. The em¬ 
peror is by this time weary of the strife, fearful of the 
end. “ Will the Galilean conquer?” he cries. And he 
calls upon Maximos, as reader of portents, to prophesy. 
Who shall win, he says, in this struggle? Is the king¬ 
dom that is from above to destroy the kingdom of this 
earth ? Or will the legions and the natural order be able 
to withstand the unearthly power of this wondrous and 
unseen world of spiritual influences ? Maximos answers 
darkly. Neither can succeed, he declares. Both powers, 
both kingdoms, the earthly and the unearthly, shall fall. 
That is fate. “ But what, then, shall take their place ? ” 
cries Julian. “ Who is, then, the right ruler? ” “ He,” 

answers Maximos, “ in whom both Emperor and Galilean ” 
shall be joined. There is to come, he prophesies, the third 
realm, neither of earth alone, nor yet of heaven alone, — 
“ God-Cjesar, Caesar-God, Caesar in the kingdom of the 
Spirit, God in the realm of the flesh.” “This, Julian,” 
declares Maximos, “is the third realm, for in it alone can 
be fulfilled the word, 4 Bender unto Caesar the things that 
are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.’ ” 
For only in such a realm, runs the thought of Maximos, 
will the earthly and the supernatural, once wholly in unity, 
cease to have conflicting and irreconcilable claims. Fate, 
holds Maximos, will yet bring this thing to pass, but not, 
indeed, in these times of Julian. 

I do not feel these words of Ibsen’s to be more than 
merely suggestive. I do not pretend to find in them any¬ 
thing final. But I cannot do better, as I try to give here 
some faint notion of the vast historical process whereof 
all this reflective philosophy forms so subordinate a part, 
than to point out that the third realm, of which Ibsen 
so mystically speaks, the realm where a rigid order of 


38 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


nature shall be one with the most miraculously significant 
divine truth, where Caesar shall become a spiritual, and 
God an earthly ruler, is precisely the realm which not so 
much our philosophy, but our age, whose echo this phi¬ 
losophy is, is even now seeking to comprehend, and with 
prophetic voice to proclaim. 


II. 

Let us return to our first period. A long course of 
lectures would be needed to give you any full account of 
its significance. Let me dwell a moment once more upon 
three things of importance concerning its representative 
thinkers. 

As to the first matter: I have already suggested that 
philosophy, in those days of the seventeenth century, was 
much influenced by the example of physical science. 
The modern method of what is called induction, that is, 
the method of finding the laws of nature from a careful 
collection and study of facts, won its first great triumphs 
in the work of Galileo and of his contemporaries and 
immediate successors in physical science. The Galilean 
method of studying nature was for that age one of won¬ 
derful novelty and fruitfulness. Galileo, as you know, in¬ 
troduced the fashion of making exact experiments under 
artificially simplified physical conditions. Such experi¬ 
ments showed in intelligible form how natural things really 
behave. Nature, as you see her in gross, is too complex 
for our simple minds. She hides her secrets from our 
untrained reason, by revealing them all at once. Experi¬ 
ment separates out particular groups of facts, and exam¬ 
ines them alone. Thus experiment aids the weakness of 
our reason, in its effort to find nature reasonable. Ex¬ 
periment so stands for a sort of cross-questioning of 
nature. The answers to our questions show us the ration¬ 
ality of things. But Galileo did not make such experi¬ 
ments at random. He thought out well what questions to 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


39 


ask nature. That is, by acute observation of what one 
might call the general trend of things in some part of 
nature, Galileo made exact and mathematically stateable 
hypotheses as to the true laws at work. So he did, for 
instance, in case of the facts about falling bodies, and in 
case of the facts about bodies rolling down inclines. 
When he had made his scientific guess, his hypothesis, he 
applied, if necessary, mathematics to this guess, and com¬ 
puted what ought to happen, if it were true, in certain 
definite cases, such as an experiment could artificially 
bring to pass. Then, and not till then, he tested the hy¬ 
pothesis by the experiment itself. He asked nature, “ Is 
it so and so with you, as my hypothesis demands, in this 
special case, that it shall be ? ” If nature, questioned 
through experiment, responded “ Yes,” then the hypothe¬ 
sis was verified, and the law was regarded as in its own 
proper measure established. Thus reason triumphed over 
brute fact. 

The brilliant successes of this Galilean method during 
his own and the following generations were, as I have said, 
immensely impressive to that whole century. Nature had 
at last been made to answer multitudinous sharp ques¬ 
tions. And the noteworthy thing was that her answers 
were so exact, and that her laws, when you found them, 
were so rigid, so capable of mathematical precision of 
statement, so general. Mechanical science, thus early 
and very rapidly progressing, soon suggested of itself the 
thought that nature was all one vast mechanism. The 
philosophers, with their love of grand generalizations, 
easily seized upon this idea. They tried to expound it, 
to reflect upon it, to defend it, to develop its meaning. 
Just imagine it for a moment: could one only seize upon 
the genuine and all-embracing hypothesis, could one but 
guess by good luck at the one absolute law of laws, as 
Galileo had guessed at the law of the falling bodies! 
Would not one then have an hypothesis whereof every 


40 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


fact of physical nature would be a case, a verification, an 
experimental justification ? Such a law, if you found it, 
— would it not be mechanical, like Galileo’s special laws ? 
So, at least, the century declared. But there was the other 
side to this idea, a side which suggests my second point. 
If this was so, if these exact laws, which so perfectly an¬ 
swer the demands of our reason, are true of things, then 
is rit this world about us one that clear thinking , exact 
definition , is especially fitted to comprehend f Previous 
ages had found the world mysterious, and had appealed 
to faith, which reason could only supplement. This new 
age is sure of reason , makes it lord, reveres it as the 
one revealer of mysteries, and as capable of discovering 
absolute truth. But this once more brings me yet a step 
further, namely, to my third point. Clear thinking about 
nature needs a good model. Galileo and all the other 
men of the new time had such a model before them in the 
geometrical science that had come down from the Greeks. 
The hypotheses that Galileo made were of a sort long 
since known in geometry, namely, mathematically exact 
statements, from which sharp conclusions could be drawn 
for verification or refutation. He showed how to apply 
such hypotheses to nature, namely, by means of crucial ex¬ 
periments. But the idea of the clearly thought hypothesis 
was old. Very well, then, Galileo’s successes suggested 
that geometry is indeed the model science, that nature, 
being reasonable, geometrizes, so to speak, throughout all 
her world of things, so that if you could once get her 
laws in mind, as Euclid got his axioms, then all the facts 
of nature down to the least would become as clear, as cer¬ 
tain, as demonstrable to you as Euclid’s theorems are to 
the student of mathematics. Such a notion it is which is 
the common property of the seventeenth century. It was 
the presupposition of that time, the cold but deep passion 
of exact rationality, upon which the philosophers reflected, 
and in terms of which they taught. Hence it was that 
they loved mathematical methods in philosophy. 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


41 


These three ideas, then, that nature is a mechanism, 
that human reason is competent to grasp the truth of 
nature, and that, since nature’s truth is essentially mathe¬ 
matical, geometry is the model science, whose precision 
and necessity philosophy, too, must imitate, — these are 
the ideas of our first period. Descartes shares them with 
Hobbes. The widest divergence of opinion does not ex¬ 
clude them anywhere, in the representative men of that 
day. Human nature also is interpreted in terms of them. 

But how, you may ask, can such an age as this grasp 
the whole breadth and depth of the deeper passions of 
humanity? Man is n’t merely a computer, nor yet a 
geometer. He estimates, he appreciates his world; he 
does n’t merely long to describe it in mathematical terms ; 
he has religious interests, too; and what have Galilean 
physics and Euclidean geometry to say of these? Well,I 
have already observed that our seventeenth century knew 
of such a thing as a philosophical religion, and my illus¬ 
tration of that fact is the man who was in many respects 
the deepest speculator of that whole age, namely, Spinoza, 
to whom I may now pass. 

III. 

Every one has heard something of the marvelous and 
lonely Jewish philosopher, who, separated from the world 
of European cultivation by his race, and from his own 
people by his heresy, devoted himself to peaceful and fear¬ 
less reflection, and died early, not without leaving an im¬ 
mortal treatise behind him. And every one must have no¬ 
ticed how singularly varied is the view of Spinoza that one 
gets from those who know him more or less superficially. 
In his own age he was denounced as atheist, profane per¬ 
son, monster. Long afterwards, however, his works were 
re-discovered, greedily read, admired by great poets like 
Goethe, and by ardent and even romantic philosophers 
like Schelling; and now he has become an authority 


42 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


for all students of philosophy, a necessary part of the 
knowledge of every one who would comprehend modern 
thought. This great thinker himself was, to be sure, no 
universal genius in philosophy. His doctrine, compared 
with those that have come since, is comparatively simple, 
clear cut, crystalline in its hardness and isolation, and 
yet, how many-sided even this crystal, how varied the 
impressions that it has produced on those who have seen 
it in different lights ! Judging by some of the commen¬ 
tators of Spinoza, you would regard him as merely a lover 
of mathematical clearness and coldness of statement, as a 
believer in the hard and fast, eternal, but purely natural 
order of things. Others, on the contrary, have called 
him, in a phrase that has been too often repeated, “ a God- 
intoxicated man,” so that, far from being an atheist, it was 
the existence of nature that he in truth denied. Others 
have named him a mystic, a seer, a prophet; have taken, 
as the young Goethe took, an almost sentimental interest 
in him ; have found his doctrine poetical and romantic. 
Others still have prized in him the gentle humility of life. 
He won, as we learn, not only the respect of certain great 
men in his own time (who knew him mainly from afar 
and by letter), but also the love of the few homely and 
obscure people with whom he daily and personally asso¬ 
ciated ; and this has led one of his eulogizers, Ernst 
Renan, to remind us enthusiastically that “ nothing is 
worth so much as the judgment of the little ones, for it is 
almost always the judgment of God.” 

What, then, was Spinoza ? The cold and merciless 
mathematical thinker, the remorseless fatalist that some 
call him ; or the romantic and poetic soul, the mystic, the 
seer; or, finally, the saint of gracious and gentle life that 
others find him ? In fact, Spinoza had something of all 
these traits in his character and in his thought. Were I 
expounding his system in full I should make you feel this 
fact. It is already a satisfaction to be able to say that 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


43 


the least wealthy of the systems which we are to consider 
expressed so wide an experience of life, reflected upon so 
varied a group of human attitudes in the presence of the 
divine order. But still it is not for the purpose of a 
panegyric of Spinoza that I now ask your attention to 
him. His personal character cannot detain us very long. 
Nor yet, on the other hand, can we give much time to ex¬ 
amining the technical details of his system. It was in¬ 
deed a many-sided doctrine, and in some of its aspects 
highly problematic. Its sources, its growth, and its mean¬ 
ing have in recent times been the topic of elaborate 
researches, of which I can give you no fair notion here. 
I shall dwell upon but a single aspect of the whole, and 
this is the religious aspect; for Spinoza had a religion. 
There is, then, this one thing in his teaching that I wish to 
illustrate, and, if possible, to explain. This is the deep 
piety which in Spinoza’s mind is not only consistent with 
the belief in a rigid, mechanical order of nature, but 
which is even involved, according to him, in the very 
expression of such a doctrine concerning nature. 

Had Spinoza been any one but himself, he would have 
been a materialist, a cynic, and, indeed, the cold and 
merciless thinker that many, misled by one-sided views, 
have declared him to be. Because he w*as a man of 
profound character, he looked upon the whole order of 
things, and said, “ While it is necessary, while it is rigid, 
while it is in one sense merciless, it is also divine, and the 
value of our knowledge of this order is that thereby we 
are led to a love of God, to a peace which the world can¬ 
not give or take away.” 

It is surely the office of philosophic reflection to bring 
out the deeper problems of our nature. And nowhere else 
can one find a more significant problem than this, that he 
who looks upon the world solely with the eye of reason 
finds himself, when once possessed of Spinoza’s wisdom, 
forced to adore. Listen, then, in Spinoza’s case, to the 


44 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


tale of the religious experience of a great heretic, whom 
many men used to denounce as atheist. 

The external facts of Spinoza’s life, so far as they con¬ 
cern us, must be very briefly summarized. A colony of 
Spanish and Portuguese Jews, refugees from persecution, 
was, in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, 
resident in Amsterdam, in the enjoyment of the freedom 
of the Dutch republic. A son of a poor family, mem¬ 
bers of this Jewish community, Spinoza was born in the 
year 1632. He was early distinguished as a studious boy 
for his learning in the mediaeval literature of the Jews; 
he was an enthusiastic reader of Talmudic interpreters and 
commentators ; but he was also not without a wide curios¬ 
ity that led him to the study of the learned language of 
the day, namely, Latin, and to an early acquaintance with 
thought that lay far beyond the circle of the intolerant 
interests of his fellows. These studies of profane learn¬ 
ing led to suspicions of his orthodoxy, and a series of 
events followed of which we have only extremely untrust¬ 
worthy accounts from two of his early biographers. 
What happened we do not precisely know. Report says 
that companions and fellow-students of Spinoza, having 
drawn from him heretical views concerning the interpre¬ 
tation of the Scriptures, revealed the facts to the authori¬ 
ties of the synagogue; and that Spinoza was called to 
account, and was urged in more ways than one, namely, 
by bribes as well as by threats, to abandon his heresy or to 
remain silent. The affair, whatever it was, seems to have 
extended over several years; it ended in the excommuni¬ 
cation of Spinoza, in the year 1656. Thenceforth he was 
alone and free. To most other men this loneliness would 
have meant destruction. Even for Spinoza it led to cer¬ 
tain defects of thought and expression which are not with¬ 
out significance for his system as a whole. Spinoza had 
thenceforth no reason to appeal in the least to the preju¬ 
dices and learning of his former co-religionists. He 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


45 


seems rather anxious in all his philosophical writings to 
say little of his relation to Jewish philosophy, and con¬ 
siderable difference of opinion exists among competent 
inquirers as to the actual relation between his own phi¬ 
losophical doctrines and those which, from time to time, 
had been put in form by Jewish mediaeval writers. At 
all events, however, he was rather a man of his time than 
a Jew. His system has a closer connection with that of 
Descartes and with those of other prominent European 
thinkers than with any Jewish doctrines. One of his 
books, indeed, has a special relation to the studies of his 
early youth. It is a book on freedom of opinion, called 
the “ Theologico-Political Tractate.” The essence of the 
doctrine is that both the formation and the expression of 
opinion should be entirely unhindered by legal interfer¬ 
ence. In the course of the book, Spinoza enters upon an 
elaborate historical criticism of the Old Testament litera¬ 
ture, and, in many respects, curiously suggests analogies 
to the results of modern critical study of the Bible. But 
in all his other writings Spinoza is simply the speculative 
thinker. His life in his exclusion from the Jewish com¬ 
munity is as simple and uneventful as ever the experience 
of a philosopher has been. It is, in fact, the peculiar 
privilege of the philosopher to live in a certain separation 
from human responsibility, which leaves him free to criti¬ 
cise the life that no longer enchains him. It is at once 
his privilege and his danger, for freedom from the bond¬ 
age of life may easily mean disorganization or morbidness 
of life. Spinoza, however, was not only forced to live 
apart from the world, but was able to win spiritual health 
in his isolation; and the result of such separation from 
the passions of humanity shows itself all the more plainly 
in a power of dispassionate criticism which is the very 
life of philosophy. One limitation remains, however, 
especially noteworthy in Spinoza’s case. His form of iso¬ 
lation renders him a poor critic of the deeper social rela- 


46 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


tionships. In fact, had Spinoza lived in an age of great 
poetical production, this dispassionate loneliness of expe¬ 
rience would have rendered him much less competent than 
he was to reword the meaning of his time. But in an 
age of investigation he was enabled to be a model critic, 
for the interest of humanity then lay in comprehending 
the natural order of things, and one does not need a rich 
experience of social life to give expression to the inner 
meaning of an undertaking like this. 


IV. 

If one turns, however, from the thinker himself to his 
thought, it is next necessary for us to see what drove 
Spinoza to his patient and life-long business of reflection 
upon so dry and apparently lifeless a thing as the mathe¬ 
matical and rigid laws of external nature. And here 
meets us the most noteworthy fact of all about our phi¬ 
losopher. I have already said that the outcome of Spi¬ 
noza’s reflection is an adoration, an immovably peaceful 
reverence, for God’s eternal order. What I have not yet 
said is, that the longing for such an object of adoration 
is the beginning as well as the end of his whole work. 
Spinoza has left us, in an essay on “ The Improvement of 
the Understanding,” a sort of confession of the course of 
thinking which led him to his final faith. This confession 
brings us at once upon ground that is familiar to every 
one who knows well the religious passion of humanity. 

The higher religious consciousness has its origin in the 
human heart in two interests. One is the interest of the 
moral being in finding some authority that may guide him 
in the conduct of his life. The other is the interest of 
the baffled and disappointed soul in coming into the pres¬ 
ence of some external truth, some reality that is perfect, 
that lacks our weakness, that is victorious even though we 
fail, that is good even though we are worthless. I must 
pause a moment to define and illustrate these two inter- 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 47 

ests. They are both of them well known to all of you, 
whether you have succeeded in satisfying either of them 
or not. What you do not always see, until you reflect, is 
that they are really two interests, that they are often very 
hard to reconcile, that they lead you by two very different 
roads to faith, and are likely to lead to two sharply con¬ 
trasted sorts of faith. Spinoza, I am going to show you, 
had one of these interests very deeply, the other hardly 
at all. 

The religious interest of the first sort, I say, seeks an 
authoritative guide. If it finds one in some conceived 
deity, it rejoices. This deity is, in this case, above all a 
moral one. He directs me, and I follow. My delight, if 
I am devout, is then in the “ law of the Lord.” The 
law may be a ceremonial one; then I build altars, offer 
sacrifices, hold solemn feasts. Or again, his law may be a 
law of righteousness of heart and life; then, commanded 
by God, sure that he knows the right way and has shown 
it, I order my life as well as I can according to this 
righteousness. I become just, merciful, charitable, strenu¬ 
ous. I don’t ask so much who the Lord is, as what his 
will is. I may philosophize, but in that case my philoso¬ 
phy will be principally a moral philosophy. The subtle¬ 
ties of theology, the origin of evil, the nature of the 
divine plan, will concern me little. God wants me to 
work ; he asks service of me, not comprehension. As for 
the evils of life, I see that they are mostly the just pun¬ 
ishment of my sins; I endure hardness as a good soldier. 
I know meanwhile that my will is free, that I can serve' 
the law of God if I want to, that there is one who does 
not serve this law, to wit, the devil, and that I must fight 
this devil and all his works wherever I see them. My 
philosophy consists in clear thinking about my duty; my 
faith is an assurance that the right will somehow conquer; 
my love is for all who desire God’s kingdom to come; my 
hope is for the victory that is near at hand, and for the 


48 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


word, “ Well done, good and faithful servant! ” The 
crown of life is beyond, the sword is in hand, the Lord 
directs the fight, and, best of all, he needs me to help 
him against the mighty, — needs me, for he says so. In 
fact his saying so is just what constitutes his law and my 
moral comfort. If he did not need me, my life would be 
vain; in his need is my consolation. The world thus 
viewed is so simple, so directly present to you, so majestic, 
so inspiring! Love the Lord, love all his friends, and 
hate Satan. What could be plainer ? Here, you see, is 
the fine and sinewy religion of St. Christopher. The 
Lord is the strongest, fight on his side. He grants you 
a place in his service, how great is this reward! This 
love of him and of his servants, how perfect and plain a 
doctrine ! 

“Love-making, how simple a matter ! No depths to explore, 

No heights in a life to ascend ! No disheartening before, 

No affrighting hereafter, — Love now will be love evermore.” 

And true love will be the fulfilling of the law, — love 
of the good, warfare with ill. Here, then, says the active 
soul, is peace at length, the only true peace, — the peace 
of endless service, the rest of a glorious activity, the joy of 
life amongst the sons of God. After this fashion, then, 
the religion of duty meets the first of the two interests 
which I have been distinguishing. You all well know 
what religious faiths express this interest. 

Were I just now a practical teacher, I should leave you 
to enjoy the thrill of this sort of energetic devotion, and 
should not trouble you with the critical observation that 
there is quite another sort of religious interest in the 
world, which is not only very different from the foregoing, 
but which is, in the first place and naturally, opposed 
thereto. Yet this other interest, this second source of 
religion, does exist in the human heart, and gives birth 
to some of the deepest forms of piety. I am here, not as 
a practical teacher, but as an observer of life, and it is 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 40 

my duty, therefore, to call your attention to the variety 
of these two great interests, and then to show you that 
Spinoza’s religious interest, profound, saintly, mystical as 
it was, belongs to the second sort. 

Life has its wounds as well as its weapons. Your 
moral hero occasionally sees not only the discomfiture of 
Satan, but also the warm blood of his own mortal veins 
oozing forth as well. Or again, he finds himself an out¬ 
cast, as Spinoza was, who knows no army that will accept 
him, and who hears all human voices call him traitor. 
And then, indeed, he knows an experience that even the 
weaklings may aspire to share. He knows, namely, what 
it is to feel faint and sick at heart, and to see his own 
worthlessness. Then it occurs to him that perhaps the 
divine order, if haply it does really exist, may possibly 
need just his right arm a little less than he had thought. 
The idea is so commonplace a suggestion, after all. What 
more natural ? thinks the injured soul. Here I am, a 
mere writhing worm, ein truber Gast auf der dunkelen 
Erde , alone in infinite space, and I pretended to ask for 
guidance as to my petty conduct! I pretended that the 
divine order needed just me! Why did I pretend this ? 
Because of my pride, was it not ? I called this sort of 
thing piety, and then kindly offered my services to God, 
on the ground that he could do worse than to accept them, 
and with the observation that the rolls of his army were, 
before my accession, noteworthily incomplete. This, I 
called religion; and now, what happens ? Fate moves on 
its own way; I am wounded, cast down, weak, worthless. 
All his billows are gone over me. My righteousness, 
what worth was it in his sight ? Shall mortal man be 
just before God ? After all, if there is a moral order, is 
it not complete unto itself? Hid God wait all the eter¬ 
nities until I was ripened before He should triumph? 
Either he exists not at all,— and then, how shall I create 
him ? — or he exists, and then from eternity to eternity 


50 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


lie lias triumphed. His holiness I cannot create. Let me, 
if haply I may, see it, worship it, enjoy it as wondering, 
contemplative, adoring, helpless onlooker, consoled, if at 
all, by the knowledge that though I fail and am lost, 
he is from everlasting to everlasting. 

I do not fear to seem unmindful of the dignity of the 
genuine religious consciousness when I thus present to 
you the curious and, in fact, paradoxical opposition be¬ 
tween its two typical moods and their interests. The 
affair is so vital and familiar an experience that nobody 
can have failed to pass through this change of mood or 
to come close upon the problem involved in it. For our¬ 
selves, as critics of life, we have just now only to look 
on while this second form of the religious consciousness 
develops itself before our eyes into the form in which 
it becomes immediately characteristic of Spinoza. The 
problem involved is, as a general philosophical question, 
one that will concern us much later on in our course, 
when I shall ask how we are really to solve, if at all, the 
paradoxical opposition between the active and the submis¬ 
sive forms of piety. For the time being I shall simply 
let the helpless mood of the defeated soul find its own 
form of religious faith. This form is the one embodied 
in many kinds of what is called mystical religion. For¬ 
give me if I dwell upon it a little. The digression will 
in the end aid us to comprehend Spinoza. 

This second mood, you have seen, began just now with 
a somewhat cynical despair, which looked at first sight 
rather unheroic, not to say immoral. Well, relatively im¬ 
moral this form of the religious consciousness remains to 
the end. It is not its office to inspire the warriors so much 
as to comfort the downcast and to succor the wounded. 
The honors and consolations of a noble office it has not to 
offer you. It finds you despairing, and it teaches you to 
despise even your despair, and to rejoice even in your fail¬ 
ure. After all, look about you, and see what you have 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 51 

learned. Is not the lesson of your defeat the lesson of 
the universal vanity of every individual undertaking of 
man ? And what more comforting than this lesson, if only 
you become wise enough to see that above all these fail¬ 
ures of ours there is the strong and divine order that 
never strives or is weary, but that is eternally fresh in the 
youth of its perfection ? If you can but once see that 
God reigns, you will also see, says this mood, not only 
that mortals must fail, but that they deserve to fail, so 
idle is their trust in themselves, so sinful is their pride, 
so weak is everything in which they put their hope. 

If you want further illustration of this mood, you 
might, if you choose, take up that permanently charming 
record of experience, the old and thoroughly orthodox 
devotional book called “ Imitation of Christ,” and let it 
put into words this new feeling. Spinoza, very probably, 
never read this book, but, I call your special attention to 
it, we shall find him saying much the same thing, nur mit 
ein Bischen andern Worten. The burden of the 44 Imita¬ 
tion ” is the old story of human defeat. Who could say 
worse things of life than these ? 44 How can the life of 

man be loved, seeing that it hath so many bitter things, 
that it is subjected to so many calamities and miseries ? 
How can it be even called life when it produces so many 
deaths and plagues ? ” 44 1 resolve that I will act bravely, 
but when a little temptation cometh, immediately I am in 
a great strait. Wonderfully small sometimes is the mat¬ 
ter whence a grievous temptation cometh, and whilst I 
imagine myself safe for a little space, when I am not con¬ 
sidering, I find myself often almost overcome by a little 
puff of wind.” 44 Thou shalt lamentably fall away, if thou 
set a value upon any worldly thing.” 44 To-day thou con- 
fest thy sins, and to-morrow thou committest again the 
sins thou didst confess.” 44 What canst thou see any¬ 
where which can continue long under the sun ? Thou 
belie vest, perchance, that thou shalt be satisfied, but thou 


52 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

wilt never be able to attain unto this. If tliou shouldst 
see all things before thee at once, what would it be but a 
vain vision ? ” “ Trust not thy feeling, for that which is 

now will be quickly changed into somewhat else.” In 
brief, then, to sum up this whole pessimism of the devout 
author of the “ Imitation,” we, and all finite things about 
us, are utterly vain, and so, not only is our life a plague, 
but it ought to be a plague ; its miseries, its sins, its fail¬ 
ures, are not only inevitable, but they are somehow justi¬ 
fied by our fatal worthlessness. Yet consider how just this 
pessimism about the finite is used, in the “ Imitation,” to 
produce and to sustain that exalted rapture in the contem¬ 
plation of the eternal which makes the “ Imitation ” so 
curiously consoling a book. The marvel of this contrast 
between the utter corruption of the finite and the glory of 
God, the singular effect of it all upon the reader, is one of 
the most marvelous psychological puzzles about this fasci¬ 
nating and, I may even add, dangerous work of genius. 
Herein lies the wiliness of that melancholy and yet in¬ 
spiring old work: it condemns your vanities until you 
are fairly ashamed of having even once tried to be ac¬ 
tively righteous with this weak will and this worthless 
nature of yours. The sword of your moral heroism turns 
to rust, and your whole warlike harness fairly rots away 
into nothingness as you read. Life is dust and ashes. 
Death, yes, annihilation, would be a relief to your hope¬ 
less self-condemnation. And yet, above all, glittering in 
the icy glories of its eternal frost, rises before you the 
sacred mountain of God’s unapproachable grandeur. You 
look upwards to that, and lo ! like a shadow every trace 
of your misery has vanished. “ When a man cometh to 
this, that he seeketh comfort from no created being, then 
doth he perfectly begin to enjoy God; then also will he 
be well contented with whatsoever shall happen to him. 
He committeth himself altogether and with full trust unto 
God, who is all in all to him, to whom nothing perisheth 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


53 


or dieth, but all things live to him and obey his word 
without delay.” “ Let therefore nothing which thou doest 
seem to thee great; let nothing be grand, nothing of value 
or beauty, nothing worthy of honor, nothing lofty, no¬ 
thing praiseworthy or desirable, save what is eternal. 
Let the eternal truth please thee above all things; let 
thine own great vileness displease thee continually.” 
Thus, then, as all readers of the “ Imitation ” know, the 
author, turning steadfastly from the finite, comes at last to 
a new life of contemplative freedom, a life where indeed 
positive action, service of the Lord with a sense that the 
Lord needs one, has small place, but where once more 
something called love inspires afresh the heart. This 
“ love ” of the “ Imitation ” is no longer the naive, child¬ 
like, warmly vital love of the optimistic warrior who in 
this world cheerfully serves God, like a St. Christopher, 
because God is the strongest. This new sort of love is a 
mystical adoration. It produces acts, but they are done 
in a dream-like sort of somnambulistic ecstasy; they are 
the acts of one hypnotized, so to speak, by a long look 
heavenwards. Strength this love has, but it is the 
strength of gazing; movement it has, but it is an anaes¬ 
thetic, unconscious sort of movement. “ Love feeleth no 
burden, reckoneth not labors.” This anaesthesia is not 
the willing work of the faithful servant so much, as an 
incident of the rapturous wandering of one lost in God. 
“ Nothing is sweeter than love, nothing stronger, nothing 
loftier, nothing broader, nothing pleasanter, nothing fuller 
or better in heaven or earth; for love was born of God 
and cannot rest save in God, above all created things. 
He who loveth, flyeth, runneth, and is glad; he is free 
and not hindered ; he giveth all things for all things, and 
hath all things in all things, because he resteth in One 
who is high above all, from whom every good floweth 
and proceedeth. He looketh not for gifts, but turneth 
himself to the Giver above all good things. . . . Love is 


54 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

watchful, and whilst sleeping still keeps watch; though 
fatigued it is not weary, though pressed it is not forced, 
though alarmed it is not terrified ; but like the living 
flame and the burning torch, it breaketh forth on high, 
and securely triumpheth. If a man loveth, he knoweth 
what this voice crieth. For the ardent affection of the 
soul is a great clamor in the ears of God, and it saith, My 
God, my Beloved! Thou art all mine, and I am all 
thine.” 

v. 

I have dwelt upon the expressions of this kind of reli¬ 
gious interest as we find them in such orthodox books as 
the “ Imitation,” because I want to remind you of the 
peculiarities of the well-known mood of the mystics, in 
order to make the attitude of Spinoza, the heretic, more 
easily comprehensible. Spinoza’s religious concern, I 
insist, is of this latter sort. He is n’t a man of action ; 
his heroism, such as it is, is the heroism of contemplation. 
He is not always, let me tell you, in his religious mood; 
and when he is not, he appears as a cynical observer of 
the vanity of mortal passions. But as religious thinker, 
he is no cynic. Unswervingly he turns from the world of 
finite hopes and joys ; patiently he renounces every sort 
of worldly comfort; even the virtue that he seeks is not 
the virtue of the active man. There is one good thing, 
and that is the Infinite; there is one wisdom, and that is 
to know God; there is one sort of true love, and that is 
the submissive love of the saintly onlooker, who in the 
solitude of reflection sees everywhere an all-pervading 
law, an all-conquering truth, a supreme and irresistible 
perfection. Sin is merely foolishness; insight is the only 
virtue ; evil is nothing positive, but merely the depriva¬ 
tion of good; there is nothing to lament in human affairs, 
except the foolishness itself of every lamentation. The 
wise man transcends lamentation, ceases to love finite 
things, ceases therefore to long and to be weary, ceases 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 55 

to strive and to grow faint, offers no foolish service to 
God as a gift of his own, hut possesses his own soul in 
knowing God, and therefore enters into the divine free¬ 
dom, by reason of a clear vision of the supreme and neces« 
sary laws of the eternal world. 

This, then, is the essence of Spinoza’s religion. He 
begins his essay on the “ Improvement of the Understand¬ 
ing ” with words that we now are prepared to comprehend. 
This essay and the fifth part of the ethics show us Spi¬ 
noza’s religious attitude and experience, elsewhere much 
veiled in his works. “ After experience had taught me,” 
says the essay, 44 that all the usual surroundings of social 
life are vain and futile, seeing that none of the objects of 
my fears contained in themselves anything either good or 
bad, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I 
finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some 
real good which would affect the mind singly, to the 
exclusion of all else, whether there might be anything of 
which the discovery and attainment would enable me to 
enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness.” 
Here is the starting-point. Life for Spinoza is in the 
ordinary world a vain life, because, for the first, it is our 
thinking that makes the things about us good or bad to 
us, and not any real value of the things themselves, whilst 
the transiency, the uncertainty of these finite things 
brings it about that, if we put our trust in them, they will 
erelong disappoint us. Rapidly, from this beginning, 
Spinoza rehearses the familiar tale of the emptiness of the 
life of sense and worldliness, the same tale that all the 
mystics repeat. The reader, who has never felt this 
experience of Spinoza and of the other mystics, always 
feels indeed as if such seeming pessimism must be largely 
mere sour-heartedness, or else as if the expression of it 
must be pure cant. But after all, in the world of spirit¬ 
ual experiences, this, too, is a valuable one to pass through 
and to record. Whoever has not sometime fully felt what 


56 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


it is to have his whole world of finite ambitions and affec¬ 
tions through and through poisoned, will indeed not easily 
comprehend the gentle disdain with which Spinoza, in this 
essay, lightly brushes aside pleasure, wealth, fame, as 
equally and utterly worthless. We know, indeed, little of 
Spinoza’s private life, but if we should judge from his 
words we should say that as exile he has felt just this bit¬ 
terness, and has conquered it, so that when he talks of 
vanity he knows whereof he speaks. People who have 
never walked in the gloomy outlying wastes of spiritual 
darkness have never had the chance to find just the sort 
of divine light which he finally discovered there. These 
mystics, too, have their wealth of experience; don’t 
doubt their sincerity because they tell a strange tale. 
Don’t doubt it even if, like Spinoza, they join with their 
mysticism other traits of the wonderful Jewish character, 
— shrewd cynicism, for instance. When they call plea¬ 
sure and wealth and fame all dust and ashes, they possibly 
know whereof they speak, at least as far as concerns them¬ 
selves alone. Spinoza, at any rate, twice in his life, re¬ 
fused, if his biographers are right, the offered chance to 
attain a competency. He declined these chances because, 
once for all, worldly means would prove an entanglement 
to him. He preferred his handicraft, and earned his liv¬ 
ing by polishing lenses. Steadfastly, moreover, as we 
know, he refused opportunities to get a popular fame, and 
even to make a worthily great name. The chief instance 
is his refusal of the professorship which the Elector Pala¬ 
tine offered him in 1673 at Heidelberg, under promise of 
complete freedom of teaching, and with the obvious chance 
of an European reputation. So Spinoza did not merely 
call the finite world names, as many do; he meant his 
word, and he kept it. He was no sentimentalist, no emo¬ 
tional mystic. He was cool-headed, a lover of formulas 
and of mathematics; but still he was none the less a true 
mystic. 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


57 


Well, he finds the finite vain, because you have to pur¬ 
sue it, and then it deceives you, corrupts you, degrades 
you, and in the end fails you, being but a fleeting shadow 
after all. “ I thus perceived,” he says, “ that I was in a 
state of great peril, and I compelled myself to seek with 
all my strength for a remedy, however uncertain it might 
be, as a sick man struggling with a deadly disease, when 
he sees that death will surely be upon him unless a remedy 
be found, is compelled to seek such a remedy with all his 
strength, inasmuch as his whole hope lies therein. All 
the objects pursued by the multitude not only bring no 
remedy that tends to preserve our being, but even act as 
hindrances, causing the death not seldom of those who 
possess them, and always of those who are possessed by 
them.” “ All these evils,” he continues, “ seem to have 
arisen from the fact that our happiness or unhappiness 
has been made the mere creature of the thing that we 
happen to be loving. When a thing is not loved, no strife 
arises about it; there is no pang if it perishes, no envy if 
another bears it away, no fear, no hate ; yes, in a word, 
no tumult of soul. These things all come from loving 
that which perishes, such as the objects of which I have 
spoken. But love towards a thing eternal feasts the mind 
with joy alone, nor hath sadness any part therein. Hence 
this is to be prized above all, and to be sought for with 
all our might. I have used the words not at random, — 
‘ If only I could be thorough in my seeking; ’ for I found 
that though I already saw all this in mind, I could not 
yet lay aside avarice and pleasure and ambition. Yet one 
thing I found, that as long as I was revolving these 
thoughts, so long those desires were always behind my 
back, whilst I strenuously sought the new light; and 
herein I found great comfort, for I saw that my disease 
was not beyond hope of physic. And although at first 
such times were rare, and endured but for a little space, 
yet as more and more the true good lighted up my mind, 
such times came quicker and endured longer.” 


58 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


VI. 

This, then, the beginning of Spinoza’s Pilgrim’s Pro¬ 
gress. But now for what distinguishes him from other 
mystics, and makes him a philosopher, not a mere ex- 
horter. He has his religious passion, he must reflect upon 
it. The passion any one might have who had passed 
through the dark experience of which we spoke a moment 
since. The philosopher must justify his faith. And how 
hard to justify such a faith it would seem in this cold and 
severe seventeenth century. It was an age, you remem¬ 
ber, when everything held to be at all occult was banished 
from the thoughts of the wise, and when clear thinking 
alone was believed in, when man, too, was held to be a 
mechanism, a curiously complicated natural machine, when 
Hobbes, greatest amongst the English speculative think¬ 
ers of the age — a writer much read by Spinoza — could 
declare that the word “ spirit ” was a meaningless sound, 
and that nothing exists but bodies and movements. How 
defend a mystical religious faith at such a moment? 
Spinoza’s defense is so ingenious, so profound, so simple, 
as to give us one of the most noteworthy and dramatic 
systems ever constructed. Once more I assure you that I 
here expound only one aspect of his thought. I ignore his 
peculiar methods; I ignore his technicalities ; I give you 
but the kernel of his doctrine concerning religious truth. 

Technicalities aside, this doctrine is essentially founded 
upon what Spinoza regards as the axiom that everything 
in the world must be either explained by its own nature, 
or by some higher nature. 1 You explain a thing when 
you comprehend why it must be what it is. Thus, for 
instance, in geometry you know that all the diameters of 
any one circle must be precisely equal, and you know that 
this is so, because you see why it must be so. 2 The diam- 

1 See Eth. I. Axioms i. and ii. 

2 See examples in the Tractat. de Emendat. Int. under the head of 
rules for definition. 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


59 


eters are all drawn in the circle and through the centre of 
it, and the circle has a certain nature, a structure, a make, 
a build, whereby, for instance, you distinguish it from an 
oval or a square. This build, this make of the circle, it is 
that forces the diameters to be equal. They can’t help 
being equal, being drawn through the centre of a curve 
which has no elongation, no bulge outwards in one direc¬ 
tion more than another, but which is evenly curved all 
around. The nature of the circle, then, at once forces the 
diameters to be equal, — pins them down to equality, 
hems in any rebellious diameter that should try to stretch 
out farther than the others, — and also explains to the 
reason of a geometer just why this result follows. My 
example is extremely dry and simple, but it will serve to 
show what Spinoza is thinking of. He says now, as some¬ 
thing self-evident, that anything in the world which 
does n’t directly contain its own explanation must be a 
part of some larger nature of things which does explain 
it, and which, accordingly, forces it to be just what it is. 
For instance, to use my own illustration, if two mountains 
had precisely the same height, as the diameters of a cir¬ 
cle have precisely the same length, we should surely have 
to suppose something in the nature of the physical uni¬ 
verse which forced just these two mountains to have the 
same height. But, even so, as things actually are, we 
must suppose that whatever is or happens, in case it is 
not a self-evident and necessary thing, must have its 
explanation in some higher and larger nature of things. 
Thus, once more, you yourself are either what you are by 
virtue of your own self-evident and self-made nature, or 
else, as is the view of Spinoza, you are forced to be what 
you are by the causes that have produced you, and that 
have brought you here. Cause and explanation mean 
for Spinoza the same thing. He knows only rigidly math¬ 
ematical necessity. Yet more, not only you, but every 
act, every thought of yours, each quiver of your eyelashes, 


60 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY". 


each least shadow of feeling in your mind, must be just as 
much a result of the nature of things as your existence 
itself. Nothing comes by chance ; everything must be 
what it is. Could you see the world at one glance, “ under 
the form of eternity,” you would see everything as a 
necessary result of the whole nature of things. It would 
be as plain to you that you must now have this quiver of 
eyelash or this shade of feeling; it would be also as plain 
to you why you must have these seemingly accidental ex 
periences, as it is plain to the geometer why the evenly 
curved circle must forbid its diameters to be unequal. It 
is of the nature of reason to view things as necessary, as 
explicable, as results either of their own nature, or, if 
this isn’t the case, then of the higher nature of things 
whereof they form a part. 

From this axiom, Spinoza proceeds, by a very short but 
thorny road, to the thought that, if this is so, there must 
be some one highest nature of things, which explains all 
reality. That such highest nature exists, he regards as 
self-evident. The self-explaining must, of course, explain, 
and so make sure, its own existence. Spinoza shows by 
devices which I cannot here follow that there couldn’t 
be numerous self - explained and separate natures of 
things. 1 The world is one, and so all the things in it 
must be parts of one self-evident, self-producing order, 
one nature. Spinoza conceives this order, describes its 
self-explaining and all-producing character, as well as he 
can, and then gives it a name elsewhere well known to 
philosophers, but used by him in his own sense. He calls 
the supreme nature of things the universal “ Substance ” 
of all the world. In it are we all; it makes us what we 
are ; it does what its own nature determines ; it explains 
itself and all of us ; it is n’t produced, it produces; it 
is uncreate, supreme, overruling, omnipresent, absolute, 

1 Eth. I. prop. y. ; prop. viii. schol. ii. ; props, xi. and xiv. ; Epist. 
xxxiv. (Hague edition). 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


61 


rational, irreversible, unchangeable, the law of laws, the 
nature of natures ; and we — we, with all our acts, 
thoughts, feelings, life, relations, experiences — are just 
the result of it, the consequences of it, as the diameters 
are results of the nature of a circle. Feel, hope, desire, 
choose, strive, as you will, all is in you because this uni¬ 
versal “ substance ” makes you what you are, forces you 
into this place in the nature of things, rules you as the 
higher truth rules the lower, as the wheel rules the spoke, 
as the storm rules the raindrop, as the tide rules the 
wavelet, as autumn rules the dead leaves, as the snow¬ 
drift rules the fallen snowflake; and this substance is 
what Spinoza calls God. 

If you ask what sort of thing this substance is, the 
first answer is, it is something eternal; and that means, 
not that it lasts a good while, but that no possible tem¬ 
poral view of it could exhaust its nature. 1 All things 
that happen result from the one substance. This surely 
means that what happens now and what happened mil¬ 
lions of years ago are, for the substance, equally present 
and necessary results. To illustrate once more in my own 
way: A spider creeping back and forth across a circle 
could, if she were geometrically disposed, measure out in 
temporal succession first this diameter and then that. 
Crawling first over one diameter, she would say, “ I now 
find this so long.” Afterwards examining another diame¬ 
ter, she would say, “ It has now happened that what I 
have just measured proves to be precisely as long as what 
I measured some time since, and no longer.” The toil of 
such a spider might last many hours, and be full of such 
successive measurements, each marked by a spun thread 
of web. But the true circle itself within which the web 
was spun, the circle in actual space as the geometer knows 
it, would its nature be thus a mere series of events, a 
mere succession of spun threads? 2 No, the true circle 

J Eth. I. def. viii. and Explicatio. 

* This illustration will easily be recognized as an effort at a para- 


62 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


would be timeless, a truth founded in the nature of space, 
outlasting, preceding, determining all the weary web-spin¬ 
ning of this time-worn spider. Even so we, spinning our 
web of experience in all its dreary complication in the 
midst of the eternal nature of the world-embracing sub¬ 
stance, imagine that our lives somehow contain true nov¬ 
elty, discover for the substance what it never knew before, 
invent new forms of being. We fancy our past wholly 
past, and our future wholly unmade. We think that 
where we have as yet spun no web there is nothing, and 
that what we long ago spun has vanished, broken by the 
winds of time, into nothingness. It is not so. For the 
eternal substance there is no before and after; all truth is 
truth. “ Far and forgot to me is near,” it says. In the 
unvarying precision of its mathematical universe, all is 
eternally written. 

“ Not all your piety nor wit 
Can lure it back to cancel half a line, 

Nor all your tears wash out one word of it.” 

What will be for endless ages, what has been since time 
began, is in the one substance completely present, as in 
one scroll may be written the joys and sorrows of many 
lives, as one earth contains the dead of countless genera¬ 
tions, as one space enfolds all the limitless wealth of 
figured curves and of bodily forms. 

This substance, then, this eternal, is Spinoza’s God. In 
describing it I have used terms, comparisons, and illustra¬ 
tions largely my own. I hope that I have been true to 
the spirit of Spinoza’s thought. Remember, then, of the 
substance that it is absolutely infinite and self-deter¬ 
mined ; that it exists completely and once for all; that 
all the events of the world follow from it as the nature 

phrase of Eth. II. prop. viii. coroll, and schol., a passage where, as 
in the illustration above used, one finds presented, but not solved, the 
whole problem of the true relation of finite and infinite, temporal 
and eternal. 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


63 


of the diameter follows from the nature of the circle, and 
that as for yourself, it enfolds, overpowers, determines, 
produces both you and your destiny, as the storm em¬ 
braces the raindrop, and as the nature of a number deter¬ 
mines the value of its factors. Yet now you will ask one 
question more. This substance, so awful in its fatal per¬ 
fection, is it, you will say, something living and intelligent 
that I can revere, or is it something dead, a mere blind 
force ? Spinoza answers this question in a very original 
way. The substance, he says, must have infinitely numer¬ 
ous ways of expressing itself, each complete, rounded, 
self-determined. It is like an infinite sacred scripture, 
translated into endlessly numerous tongues, but complete 
in each tongue. Of these self-expressions of the sub¬ 
stance, we mortals know only two. One is the material 
world, — Spinoza calls it body or bodily substance. The 
other is the inner world of thought, — Spinoza calls it 
thinking substance, or mind. These two worlds, Spinoza 
holds, are equally real, equally revelations of the one 
absolute truth, equally divine, equally full of God, equally 
expressions of the supreme order. But, for the rest, they 
are, as they exist here about us, mutually independent. 
The substance expresses itself in matter; very well, then, 
all material nature is full of rigid and mathematical law: 
body moves body; line determines line in space; every¬ 
thing, including this bodily frame of ours, is an expres¬ 
sion of the extended or corporeal aspect or attribute of 
the substance. In stars and in clouds, in dust and in 
animals, in figures and in their geometrical properties, 
the eternal writes its nature, as in a vast hieroglyphic. 
Equally, however, the substance writes itself in the events 
and the laws of mental life. And that it does so, the 
very existence of our own minds proves. Thought pro¬ 
duces thought, just as body moves body, while on the 
other hand it is inconceivable that mind should act on 
body, or body explain mind. And so these two orders, 


64 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


mental and corporeal, are precisely parallel. For neither 
belongs to, or is part of, or is explained by, the other. 
Both, then, must be equally and independently expres¬ 
sions of God the substance. Hence, as each of the two 
orders expresses God’s nature, each must be as omnipres¬ 
ent as the other. Wherever there is a body, God,, says 
Spinoza, has a thought corresponding to that body. All 
nature is full of thought. Nothing exists but has its own 
mind, just as you have your mind. The more perfect 
body has, indeed, the more perfect mind; a crowbar is n’t 
as thoughtful as a man, because in the simplicity of its 
metallic hardness it finds less food for thought. 1 But, all 
the same, the meanest of God’s creatures has some sort 
of thought attached to it, not indeed produced or affected 
in any wise by the corporeal nature of this thing, but 
simply parallel thereto; an expression, in cogitative or 
sentient terms, of the nature of the facts here present. 
Well, this thought is just as real an expression of the 
divine nature as is matter. There is just as much neces¬ 
sity, connection, completeness, mutual interdependence, 
rationality, eternity, in mind as in body. Of God’s thought 
your thought is a part, just as your body is a part of the 
embodied substance. His thinking nature produces your 
ideas, as his corporeal nature produces your nerves. 
There is, however, no real influence of body over mind, 
or the reverse. The two are just parallel. The order 
and connection of ideas is the same as the order and con¬ 
nection of things. Just so far as your bodily life extends, 
so far and no further, in the mental world, extends your 
thought. You make nothing by your thinking but your 
own thoughts; but as your body is a part of nature, so 
also is your mind a part of the infinite mind. “ I declare,” 
says Spinoza, in a letter to a friend, “I declare the human 
mind to be a part of nature, namely, because I hold that 

1 The illustration is my own. The thought is that of Eth. II. 
prop. xiii. and the scholium thereto. 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


65 


in nature there exists an infinite power of thinking, which 
power, so far as it is infinite, contains ideally the whole 
of nature, in such wise that its thoughts proceed in the 
same fashion as nature herself, being, in fact, the ideal 
mirror thereof. 1 Hence follows that I hold the human 
mind to be simply this same power (of divine thought), 
not so far as it is infinite and perceives the whole of 
nature, but as far as it perceives alone the human body; 
and thus I hold our human mind to be part of this infi¬ 
nite intellect.” 

VII. 

I have thus led you a tedious way through this thorny 
path of Spinoza’s thought. I have had no hope to make 
their connections all clear ; I shall be content if you bear 
in mind this as the outcome: our reason perceives the 
world to be one being, whose law is everywhere and eter¬ 
nally expressed. Only this eternal point of view shows 
us the truth. But if we are rational, we can assume such 
an eternal point of view, can see God everywhere, and can 
so enter, not merely with mystical longings, but with a 
clear insight into an immediate communion with the Lord 
of all being. And this Lord, he is indeed the author of 
matter. The earth, the sea, yes, the very geometrical 
figures themselves write his truth in inanimate outward 
forms. But meanwhile (and herein lies the hope of our 
mystical religion) this substance, this deity, possesses and 
of its nature determines also and equally an infinite mind, 
of whose supreme perfection our minds are fragments. 
We are thus not only the sons of God ; so far as we are 
wise our lives are hid in God, we are in Him, of Him; 
we recognize this indwelling, we lose our finiteness in 
Him, we become filled with the peace which the eternal 
brings; we calm the thirst of our helpless finite passion 
by entering consciously into his eternal self-possession 

1 Nimirum ejus ideatum , the corrected reading of the Hague edi¬ 
tion of Van Vloten and Land. See Epist. xxxii. p. 130. 


66 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

and freedom. For the true mind, like the true natural 
order, knows nothing of the bondage of time, thinks of 
no before and after, has no fortune, dreads nothing, la¬ 
ments nothing; but enjoys its own endlessness, its own 
completeness, has all things in all things, and so cries, like 
the lover of the “ Imitation,” “My Beloved, I am all thine, 
and thou art all mine.” 

In the fifth part of Spinoza’s “ Ethics,” his own descrip¬ 
tion of the wise man’s love of God closes his wonderful 
exposition. This love is superior to fortune, renounces 
all hopes and escapes all fears, feeds alone on the thought 
that God’s mind is the only mind, loves God with a frag¬ 
ment of “ that very love wherewith God loves himself.” 
The wise man thus wanders on earth in whatever state 
you will, — poor, an outcast, weak, near to bodily death; 
but “ his meditation is not of death, but of life; ” of the 
eternal life whereof he is a part, and has ever been and 
ever will be a part. You may bound him in a nut-shell, 
but he counts himself king of infinite space ; and rightly, 
for the bad dreams of this phantom life have ceased to 
trouble him. “ His blessedness,” says Spinoza, “ is not 
the reward of his virtue, but his virtue itself. He re¬ 
joices therein, not because he has controlled his lusts ; con¬ 
trariwise, because he rejoices therein, the lusts of the finite 
have no power over him.” “Thus appears how potent, 
then, is the wise man, and how much he surpasses the igno¬ 
rant man, who is driven only by his lusts. For the igno¬ 
rant man is not only distracted in various ways by exter¬ 
nal causes, without ever gaining true acquiescence of 
mind, but moreover lives, as it were, unwitting of him¬ 
self and of God and of things, and, as soon as he ceases 
to suffer, ceases also to be. Whereas the wise man, in so 
far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at all disturbed 
in spirit, but being conscious of himself and of God and 
of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to 
be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit. 


THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


67 


If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this 
result seems exceedingly hard, it may, nevertheless, be 
discovered. Needs must it be hard since it is so seldom 
found. How would it be possible if salvation were ready 
to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that 
it should be by almost all men neglected ? But all things 
excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” 

With these ftords closes the book of Spinoza’s expe¬ 
rience. 


LECTURE III. 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE*. FROM SPINOZA 
TO KANT. 

In the lecture of to-day, as I must frankly assure you 
at the outset, our path lies for the most part in far less 
inspiring regions than those into which, at the last time, 
Spinoza guided us. You are well acquainted with a fact 
of life to which I may as well call your attention forthwith, 
the fact, namely, that certain stages of growing intelligence, 
and even of growing spiritual knowledge, are marked by 
an inevitable, and, at first sight, lamentable decline, in 
apparent depth and vitality of spiritual experience. The 
greatest concerns of our lives are, in such stages of our 
growth, somehow for a while hidden, even forgotten. We 
become more knowing, more clever, more critical, more 
wary, more skeptical, but we seemingly do not grow more 
profound or more reverent. We find in the world much 
that engages our curious attention ; we find little that is 
sublime. Our world becomes clearer ; a brilliant, hard, 
mid-morning light shines upon everything; but this light 
does not seem to us any longer divine. The deeper 
beauty of the universe fades out; only facts and pro¬ 
blems are left. 

Such a stage in human experience is represented, in 
great part, by the philosophical thinkers who flourish 
between the time of Spinoza’s death, in 1677, and the 
appearance of Kant’s chief philosophical work, “ The Cri¬ 
tique of Pure Reason,” in 1781. It is the period which 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


69 


has been especially associated, in historical tradition, with 
the eighteenth century, so that when one speaks of the 
spirit of the eighteenth century, he is likely to be refer¬ 
ring to this skeptical and critical mood, to this hard, mid¬ 
morning light of the bare understanding, beneath which 
most of these thinkers of our period saw all their world 
lying. When I undertake to describe such a time, I 
therefore feel in its spirit a strong contrast to that curious 
but profound sort of piety which we were describing in 
the last lecture in the case of Spinoza. Spinoza, indeed, 
was in respect of his piety a man of marked limitations. 
His world had but one sublime feature in it, one element 
of religious significance, namely, the perfection of the 
divine substance. But then this one element was enough, 
from his point of view, to insure an elevated and un¬ 
troubled repose of faith and love, which justified us in 
drawing a parallel between his religious consciousness and 
that of the author of the “Imitation of Christ.” This 
sort of piety almost disappears from the popular philos¬ 
ophy of the early eighteenth century. What the people 
of that time want is more light and fewer unproved as¬ 
sumptions. 

As against the earlier seventeenth-century thinkers, 
who, as you remember, also abhorred the occult, and 
trusted in reason, the thinkers of this new age are char¬ 
acterized by the fact that on the whole they have a great 
and increasing suspicion of even that rigid mathematical 
method of research itself upon which men like Spinoza 
had relied. In other words, whereas the men of the 
middle of the seventeenth century had trusted to reason 
alone, the men of the subsequent period began, first hesi¬ 
tatingly, and then more and more seriously, to distrust 
even human reason itself. After all, can you spin a 
world, as Spinoza did, out of a few axioms ? Can you 
permanently revere a divine order that is perhaps the 
mere creature of the assumptions witli which your system 


70 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


happened to start? The men of the new age are not 
ready to answer “ Yes ” to such questions. They must re¬ 
flect, they must peer into reason itself. They must ask, 
Whence arise these axioms, how come we by our knowledge, 
of what account are our mathematical demonstrations, and 
of what, after all, does our limited human nature permit 
us to be sure ? Once started upon this career, the thought 
of the time is driven more and more, as we have already 
said, to the study of human nature, as opposed to the ex¬ 
clusive study of the physical universe. The whole range 
of human passion, so far as the eighteenth century knew 
about it, is criticised, but for a good while in a cautious, 
analytical, cruelly scrutinizing way, as if it were all some¬ 
thing suspicious, misleading, superstitious. The coldness 
of the seventeenth century is still in the air; but Spi¬ 
noza’s sense of sublimity is gone. Spinoza himself, you 
remember, had altogether rejected, as occult, everything 
miraculous, marvelous, extra-natural. Not the thunder or 
the earthquake or the fire could for him contain God ; God 
was in the still small voice that the wise man alone heard. 
Now the popular philosophy of the eighteenth century 
more and more approached a position which unconsciously 
agreed with Spinoza’s in a number of respects. It cor¬ 
dially recognized, for instance, that the earthquake, say 
the great Lisbon earthquake of 1758, was a fearful thing, 
but that God was very certainly not in that earthquake. 
It could readily make out the same thing concerning any 
amount of thunder, fire, or wind that you might produce 
for inspection. But it went one step further than Spi¬ 
noza’s wise man, and was forced to observe, that, after con¬ 
siderable scrutiny, it had as yet been able to detect in the 
world of reason and experience no still, small voice what¬ 
soever. That at least, as I say, was the outcome of a 
considerable portion of the thought of the time. It was 
indeed not the outcome of all the thinking of this age. In 
Leibnitz, who was a younger contemporary of Spinoza, and 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 71 

who flourished in the closing decades of the seventeenth 
century, and at the beginning of the new period, philo¬ 
sophical theology found an expositor of the greatest specu¬ 
lative ingenuity and of the most positive tendency. Later, 
in the ever-fascinating Bishop Berkeley, not merely theo¬ 
logical doctrine, but a profoundly spiritual idealism got 
voice. In Rousseau, a new era of sentimental piety found 
its beginning, and all this movement led erelong to Kant 
himself. But for the moment I am speaking of tenden¬ 
cies in a most general way, and this negative, this cautious, 
skeptical attitude, is the one most observable in the phi¬ 
losophy of our period. 

I. 

Those of us who look to philosophy for positive expe¬ 
riences, rather than for technical instruction, will at first 
sight regard such a period as this with some natural 
indifference. The skeptic is not always an interesting 
person; but then, you must remember, as skeptic he does n’t 
want to be interesting. He only wishes to be honest. 
He is meanwhile not only to be tolerated; he is also 
indispensable. Philosophical thought that has never been 
skeptical is sure not to be deep. The soul that never has 
doubted does not know whether it believes; and at all 
events the thinker who has not dwelt long in doubt has no 
rights to high rank as a reflective person. In fact, a study 
of history shows that if there is anything that human 
thought and cultivation have to be deeply thankful for, it 
is an occasional but truly great and fearless age of doubt. 
You may rightly say that doubt has no value in itself. 
Its value is in what it leads to. But then consider what 
ages of doubt have led to. Such an age in Greece pro¬ 
duced that father of every humane sort of philosophizing, 
Socrates. The same age nourished with doubts the di¬ 
vine thought of Plato. Another and yet sterner age of 
doubt brought about the beginnings of Christian thought, 
prepared the Roman empire for the new faith, and saved 


72 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the world from being ruined by the multitudinous fanati¬ 
cal rivals of Christianity. Yet a third great age of doubt 
began, at the Renaissance, the history of modern literature, 
and made the way plain for whatever was soundest about 
the Reformation. And a fourth age of doubt, the one 
under our consideration in this present lecture, proved 
more fruitful for good to humanity than a half dozen 
centuries of faith had done at another time. For, as we 
shall see, this eighteenth-century doubting drove thinkers 
from the study of nature to the study first of human 
reason, then of human conscience, then of all the human 
heart and soul, and meanwhile cleared the way for those 
triumphs of the spirit over great evils which have taken 
place from the moment of the French Revolution until 
now. Despise not doubting ; it is often the best service 
thinking men can render to their age. Condemn it not; 
it is often the truest piety. And when I say this I do 
not mean merely to repeat cant phrases. I speak witb 
reason. Doubt is never the proper end of thinking, but 
it is a good beginning. The wealth of truth which our 
life, our age, our civilization, our religion, our own hearts 
may contain, is not quite our property until we have won 
it. And we can win it only when we have first doubted 
the superficial forms in which at the outset it presents 
itself to our apprehension. Every true lover has in the 
beginning of his love grave doubts of his beloved’s affection 
for him. And such doubts often take on bitter and even 
cynical forms in his soul in the various bad quarters of an 
hour that fall to his lot. Doubt, however, is not the foe, 
but the very inspirer of his love. It means that the be¬ 
loved is yet to be won. It means that the simple warmth 
of his aspiration is n’t enough, and that, if the beloved is 
worth winning, she is worth wooing through doubt and 
uncertainty for a good while. Moreover, it is not the 
fashion of the beloved, in the typical case, to be especially 
forward in quelling such doubts, by making clear her atti- 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


73 


tude too soon. If it were, love-making might be a simpler 
affair, but would not be so significant an experience as it 
is. Doubt is the cloud that is needed as a background for 
love’s rainbow. Even so it is, however, in the world of 
abstracter thought. The more serious faiths of humanity 
can only be won, if at all, by virtue of much doubting. 
The divine truth is essentially coy. You woo her, you 
toil for her, you reflect upon her by night and by day, you 
search through books, study nature, make experiments, 
dissect brains, hold learned disputations, take counsel of 
the wise; in fine, you prepare your own ripest thought, and 
lay it before your heavenly mistress when you have done 
your best. Will she be pleased? Will she reward you 
with a glance of approval? Will she say, Thou hast well 
spoken concerning me ? Who can tell ? Her eyes have 
their own beautiful fashion of looking far off when you 
want them to be turned upon you ; and, after all, perhaps 
she prefers other suitors for her favor. The knowledge 
that she is of sufficiently exalted dignity to be indifferent 
to you, if she chooses, is what constitutes the mood known 
as philosophical skepticism. You see that, in sound- 
hearted thinkers, it is like the true lover’s doubt whether 
his unwon mistress regards him kindly or no. It is not, 
then, a deadening and weakening mood; it is the very soul 
of philosophical earnestness. 

Meanwhile, in describing the skepticism of our period 
I am far from wishing to trouble you with its endlessly 
varied technical subtleties. These lectures are throughout 
selective, and they sacrifice numberless intrinsically im¬ 
portant aspects of our various subjects, in order to be able 
to seize upon a few significant features, and to hold these 
up to your view. I cannot warn you too much that there 
is no chance of completeness of treatment anywhere in the 
course of our brief work together. I spared you, in the 
last lecture, whole cargoes of problems which are consigned 
to every special student of Spinoza. I shall omit in this 


74 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


every mention of innumerable significant features in the 
philosophy of our present period. All this is a matter 
of course. I remind you of it only to excuse an immediate 
and somewhat dry statement of the few features of this 
eighteenth-century skepticism to which I intend to con¬ 
fine myself in what follows. 


II. 

There are certain philosophic problems of which you are 
sure, sooner or later, to have heard something in general 
literature, and for which the time from Spinoza to Kant 
is at least partially responsible. I want to set forth a 
little of the growth of these problems, never forgetting, I 
hope, that they interest us here in their human rather than 
in their technical aspects, and that we are above all con¬ 
cerned in them as leading to Kant himself, and to those 
who came after him. And my selection is as follows: — 

You have all heard about the controversy as to whether 
man’s knowledge of more significant truth is innate, or 
whether it comes to him from without, through his senses; 
or, otherwise, as to whether the mind at birth is a 
tabula rasa , a blank white piece of innocent paper, upon 
which experience writes whatever it will, or whether the 
soul is endowed from the start with certain inborn ration¬ 
al possessions, — a divine law, for instance, written on the 
tablets of the heart, a divine wisdom about number and 
space, registered in some imperishable form in our very 
structures. You may have met with more or less elabo¬ 
rate arguments upon this topic. I do not know whether it 
has ever had more than the interest of a curious problem 
to many of us. I do know that in many styles of treat¬ 
ment it must appear as a sort of hackneyed debating-club 
question, an apparently excellent one of its sort, but a 
rather dry bone of contention, after all. 

But you now know that philosophic research is no affaii 
of the debating clubs, but a struggle of humanity to make 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


75 


its own deepest interests articulate, and therefore you will 
not expect me to deal with this question after the forensic 
fashion. What I want to do is this : — 

I want to suggest summarily the origin of the contro¬ 
versy about the innate ideas, and to show you what inter¬ 
est first led men to the question. Then, I want to indicate 
the value of the controversy as bringing about that study 
of man’s inner life which, at the close of the century, 
bore fruit in the great Romantic movement itself. Fi¬ 
nally, I want to narrate how the problems erelong took 
form, what skeptical outcome the discussion, upon one 
side, seemed to have, and what solution, what re-winning 
of the great spiritual faiths of humanity, it suggested on 
the other. In this way I shall try to prepare you for that 
stupendous revolution of philosophic thought which is 
associated with the name of Kant. 

For the first, then, as to the origin of the controversy 
about the innate ideas. I shall not go back farther in 
the history of thought than to Descartes, 1596-1650, a 
predecessor of Spinoza, and the man whose name usually 
begins the lists of modern philosophers proper, as they are 
feet forth in the text-books of the history of philosophy. 
Had I been engaged in technical teaching, it would have 
been my duty, in the last lecture, to describe the highly 
interesting relation in which Spinoza’s doctrine stands to 
that of his predecessor. As it is, I have so far passed 
Descartes over. At present I must mention, in a word, 
one or two features of his doctrine. Descartes had 
early become dissatisfied with the scholastic philosophy 
which he had learned at Jesuit hands, and decided to think 
out a system for himself. He began his reasoning by a 
formal philosophical doubt about everything that could 
conceivably be doubted, and then proceeded to examine 
whether any unassailable certainty was still left him. 
He found such an absolutely unassailable assurance in his 
own existence as a thinking being, and accordingly began 


76 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


his positive doctrine with the famous principle, “ Cogito , 
ergo sum , ” “ I think, and so I exist. ” He proceeded 
from this beginning to prove the existence of God, and 
then the existence of two so-called substances, mind and 
matter, as comprising the whole world of which we mortals 
know anything. The laws of matter he found to be those of 
mathematics, and of the elementary physics of his time. 
Of mind he also studied the constitution as well as he 
could, and the result appeared in several elaborate works. 
Now the principle on which Descartes proceeded through¬ 
out his investigations was this: “My own existence 
is the standard assurance of my thought. I know 
that I at least am. But surely, if, on examining some 
principle, say an axiom in geometry, I perceive that it is 
as plain to me, as clear, as distinct, as is my own existence, 
then indeed it must be as certain a truth as my existence.” 
This, I say, was his way of procedure, whenever he was 
puzzled about a principle. “ Is it as clear to me as my own 
existence; or can I somehow make it as clear and dis¬ 
tinct? Well, then, it is true. Is it less clear? Then I 
must examine it still further, or lay it aside as doubtful.’’ 
By this fashion of procedure, which Descartes regarded 
as the typically rational one, he managed to collect after 
a time a very goodly stock of sure and clear principles. 
Others have n’t always found them all as clear and sure 
as did Descartes, but that concerns us not now. Well, 
Descartes had a name, or in fact a brace of names, for 
these principles of his. He called them “ eternal truths,” 
and he also called them “innate” ideas or truths. We 
know them because it is of the nature of our reason to know 
them. We know them whenever we come to look at them 
squarely, whether we ever saw them in this light before or 
not. That 2 -f- 2 = 4, that things equal to the same thing 
are equal to each other, these are examples of such truths. 
They are as clear to me as that I myself exist. They are 
clear to me because my reason makes them so, and that is 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


77 


the sort of reason I have. They are innate in me. I 
don’t see them with my bodily eyes. I just know them, be¬ 
cause I do know them, and I know them also to be eternal. 

Innate truths then, for Descartes, are of this sort. 
He is n’t so much interested in finding out how so many 
truths could be innate in one poor little human soul all 
at once, as he is interested in singling them out and writ¬ 
ing down bookfuls of them. The seventeenth century, 
you remember, was not much interested in man him¬ 
self, but was very much interested in eternal truth. 
Hence Descartes makes light of the problem how all this 
thought-stuff could somehow be innate in a soul with¬ 
out the poor soul’s ever even guessing the fact until it had 
studied philosophy. Yet of course if one becomes strongly 
interested in human nature for its own sake, this problem 
which Descartes ignored must come to the front. 

The true interest of this problem, then, lies in the fact 
that by reflecting upon it philosophers have been led to 
some of the deepest undertakings of modern thought. 
For the moment it comes up as a question of mere idle 
curiosity. As such, however, the question was rather 
tauntingly suggested to Descartes himself by certain of his 
opponents. “ How can so many ideas be innate ? ” they 
said. “ Observe, children don’t know these truths of yours, 
and could n’t even grasp them. Much less could infants. 
And yet you call them innate.” Descartes, thus chal¬ 
lenged, replied curtly, but not unskillfully. They may be 
innate, he said (in substance), as predispositions, which in 
infants have n’t yet grown to conscious rank. The thing 
is simple enough. In certain families, so Descartes fur¬ 
ther explains (I do not quote his words but give their 
sense), good-breeding and the gout are innate. Yet of 
course, as he implies, the children of such families have 
to be instructed in deportment, and the infants just learn¬ 
ing to walk seem happily quite free from gout. Even 
so, geometry is innate in us, but it does n’t come to our 


78 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


consciousness without much trouble. With the taunting 
questions put to Descartes, and his example about the 
heredity of good-breeding and the gout, the question of 
the innate ideas enters modern philosophy. It was later 
to grow much more important. 

f 

hi. 

In Locke’s famous “ Essay on the Human Understand¬ 
ing,” published in 1689-90, the investigation may be said to 
have been fairly opened. Locke was born in the same year 
as Spinoza. Had he died when Spinoza died, the English 
thinker would never have been heard of in the history of 
thought. In Locke’s patient devotion to a detailed inves¬ 
tigation, we find a quality that reminds us of the most 
marked characteristic of another great Englishman, the 
scientific hero of our own day, Darwin. Locke was early 
busy with philosophy, natural science, and medicine. 
Later, he was for a short time abroad, in diplomatic ser¬ 
vice, and then lived long as the intimate friend of Lord 
Anthony Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, whose 
political fortunes he followed. His whole life was a min¬ 
gling of study, private teaching, writing and practical poli¬ 
tics. His character is thoroughly English. There is 
that typical clearness in seizing and developing his own 
chief ideas, and that manly, almost classically finished 
stubbornness as against all foreign, mystical, and especially 
Continental ideas, which usually mark the elder English 
thinkers. Give Locke a profound problem like that of the 
ireedom of the will, and he flounders helplessly. Ask 
him to look at things from a novel point of view, and he 
cannot imagine what fancy you can be dreaming of. But 
leave him to himself, and he shows you within his own 
range a fine, sensible, wholesome man at work, a thorough 
man, who has seen the world of business as well as the 
world of study, and who believes in business-like meth¬ 
ods in his philosophy. His style, to be sure, is endlessly 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


79 


diffuse, yet without being precisely wearisome, because, 
after all, it is itself the diffuseness of a man of business, 
whose accounts cover many and various transactions, and 
who has to set down all the items. Nobody can fail to 
respect Locke, unless, to be sure, his work is employed as 
a text-book for classes that are too immature to grapple 
with him. It has too frequently been thus abused, to the 
great injury of the excellent man’s popular fame. 

Locke made, as everybody knows, short work of all in¬ 
nate ideas. He found none. Infants, with their rattles, 
show no sign of being aware that things which are equal 
to the same things are equal to each other. Locke him¬ 
self, to be sure, is a poor expert concerning infants, as is 
evident from many things that he says about them, in the 
course of his book, but as to this matter he is not only 
confident but right. As for the hereditary predispositions, 
similar to good-breeding and the gout, Locke in one or 
two passages recognizes that there may, indeed must be, 
such things. But he does not see of what service they 
could be in forming knowledge, were it not for our senses. 

What interests us most in Locke, however, is not this 
negative part of his argument, but his general view of the 
nature, powers and scope of human reason, a view which 
introduces a whole century of research into man’s inner 
life. In the preface to his Essay, Locke describes to 
us the history of his book. “Were it fit,” he says, ad¬ 
dressing the reader, “ to trouble thee with the history 
of this essay, I should tell thee that five or six 
friends meeting at my chamber, and discoursing on a 
subject very remote from this, found themselves quickly 
at a stand by the difficulties that rose on every side. Af¬ 
ter we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any 
nearer a resolution of those doubts which perplexed us, it 
came into my thoughts that we took a wrong course, and 
that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of that nature, 
it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see 


80 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted 
to deal with. This I proposed to the company, who all 
readily assented ; and thereupon it was agreed that this 
should be our first inquiry. Some hasty and undigested 
thoughts on a subject I had never before considered, which 
I set down against our next meeting, gave the first en¬ 
trance into this discourse; which, having been thus begun 
by chance, was continued by entreaty; written by incoher¬ 
ent parcels; and, after long intervals of neglect, resumed 
again, as my humor or occasions permitted, and at last, 
in a retirement, where an attendance on my health gave me 
leisure, it was brought into that order thou now seest it.” 

In this modest way Locke introduces a book whose 
historical value lies precisely in this insistence upon the 
importance of knowing our own understandings, as a pre¬ 
liminary to every sort of research. And how great this 
historical value of the book! Locke and his five or six 
friends fall to discussing, in club fashion, certain unnamed 
problems. They find themselves in a quandary. Locke 
proposes that they go back on their own track a little and 
study the structure and powers of the understanding itself. 
He himself begins the analysis, the entreaty of his friends 
leads him to continue the research. The result is a big 
book, sensible, many-sided, influential. It arouses a great 
controversy, and herefrom springs, first the philosophic 
movement from Locke through Leibnitz, through the won¬ 
derful Berkeley, through the ingenious, fearless, and 
doubting Hume, to Kant himself, and European thought 
is transformed. Meanwhile, from the same root grow 
other inquiries into the mind of man. The great English 
moralists of the eighteenth century, a stately row, Shaftes¬ 
bury, Hutcheson, Butler, Adam Smith, and Hume once 
more, set forth the mysteries of the moral consciousness. 
The general public is aroused. A subjective, a humane 
mode of inquiry becomes everywhere prominent. Much 
of all this is cold and skeptical in tone. In France it gives 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


81 


us the encyclopedists, such as Diderot. But the same 
movement also gives us Rousseau. The modern novel, 
too, that great analyst of the mind and the heart of every 
man, takes its rise. I think I am not wrong in attribut¬ 
ing the novel largely to that interest in analysis for which 
Locke stood. Yonder mere outer nature is no longer 
everything. And erelong, lo! almost before they know 
it, the nations of Europe themselves are once more 
plunged into the very midst of the great problems of the 
spirit. For at length the inquiry loses its negative and 
skeptical air altogether. The world glows afresh. Pas¬ 
sion, brought by all this out of its hiding-places, grows 
hot; men have once more found something to die for; and 
what they learn to die for in the revolutionary period is 
the inner life. They die for the freedom of the subject; 
for the sacred rights of humanity; for the destruction of 
inhuman and despotic restraints. They make, indeed, vast 
blunders in all this, behead an innocent queen, set up a new 
despot merely because his rule is n’t traditional, die amid 
the snows of Russia for a bare whim, in short sin atro¬ 
ciously, but meanwhile they cleanse Europe of a whole 
dead world of irrationalisms ; they glorify the human na¬ 
ture that can endure and suffer so much for the sake of 
coming to possess itself; they create our modern world. 
And all this, I say, because they had rediscovered the 
inner life. 

Do I seem to exaggerate the significance of the mere 
thinker and his work ? I assure you that I do not. My 
idea of the mission of the philosopher is, I insist, a very 
moderate one. As I have several times said, he does n’t 
create the passions of men; he makes no new ideals. His 
only mission is to direct the attention of man to the pas¬ 
sions and ideals which they already possess. He doubts, 
analyzes, pries into this and that; and men say, How dry, 
how repellent, how unpractical, how remote from life. 
But, after all, he is prying into the secret places of the 


82 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


lightning of Jove; for these thoughts and passions upon 
which he reflects move the world. He says to his time: 
This and this hast thou, — this sense of the rights of man, 
a sword of the spirit, fashioned to slay tyrants ; — this love 
of liberty, an ideal banner bequeathed thee by a sacred 
past to cherish, as the soldiers of old cherished the stand¬ 
ard beneath which they conquered the world. Such 
things he says always, to be sure, in his own technical 
way, and for a time nobody finds it out at all or even reads 
his books. But at length discussion begins to spread, the 
word of wisdom flies from one book to another, and finally 
the people hear. They look at the sword and at the ban¬ 
ner. No philosopher made these. They are simply hu¬ 
manity’s own treasures. The philosopher had the sole 
service of calling attention to them, because, in the course 
of his critical research, he found them. But the redis¬ 
covery, how great its significance! I suppose that you 
have frequently heard it said that the philosophers had 
much to do with making the French Revolution, and you 
have wondered how this was. You may also have won¬ 
dered how this was consistent with our view that philoso¬ 
phers are the mere critics of life. I show you the solution. 
The critic creates nothing, he only points out. But his 
pointing may show you powers that were indeed always 
there, and that were even effective, but that, once afresh 
seen, suggest to active passion a thousand devices whereby 
the world is revolutionized. 

We return to Locke. By an inquiry of the sort which he 
has described to us, he had sought to comprehend the nature 
and the limits of our understanding. He had, as we saw, 
decided that innate ideas cannot do anything for know¬ 
ledge. And the force of this notion of Locke’s really was 
that, according to him, it is useless to assume, as the basis 
of our human reason, anything occult, mysterious, opaque, 
hidden away in the recesses of the mind. The real cause 
of Locke’s hatred of innate ideas is his horror of anything 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


88 


mystical. If thought is not to be clear, what shall be clear ? 
Hence, if you pretend to have any knowledge, you must 
be prepared to tell where it comes from. It won’t do to 
appeal, as Descartes did, to a certain impression of the 
clearness and distinctness of your ideas. Their origin 
will decide their value. And what is this origin ? Locke 
puts the question plainly, at the beginning of the second 
book of his Essay, and answers it in a general way. 
I quote the whole passage: — 

“ Let us, then, suppose the mind to be, as we say, white 
paper, void of all characters, without any ideas ; how comes 
it to be furnished ? Whence comes it by that vast store 
which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted 
on it with an almost endless variety ? Whence has it all 
the materials of reason and knowledge ? To this I answer, 
in one word, From Experience ; in that all our knowledge is 
founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our ob¬ 
servation, employed either about external sensible objects, 
or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived 
and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our 
understandings with all the materials of thinking. These 
two are the fountains of knowledge from whence all the 
ideas we have or can naturally have do spring.” “ First,” 
he continues, “ our senses, conversant about particular sen¬ 
sible objects, do convey into the mind several distinct per¬ 
ceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein 
those objects do affect them ; and thus we come by those 
ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bit¬ 
ter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; 
which when I say that the senses convey into the mind, 
I mean, that they from external objects convey into the 
mind what produces there those perceptions. This great 
source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly 
upon onr senses, and derived by them to the understand¬ 
ing, I call Sensation. 

“ Secondly, the other fountain, from which experience 


84 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


furnisheth the understanding with ideas, is the perception 
of the operations of our mind within us, as it is employed 
about the ideas it has got; which operations, when the soul 
comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish the under¬ 
standing with another set of ideas, which could not be had 
from things without; and such are perception, thinking, 
doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all 
the different actings of our own minds. . . . This source 
of ideas every man has wholly in himself ; and though it 
be not sense, . . . yet it is very like it, and might properly 
enough be called internal sense. But as I call the other 
sensation, so I call this Reflection, the ideas it affords 
being such only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own 
operations within itself. . . . These two, I say, namely, 
external material things, as the objects of sensation, and 
the operations of our own minds within, as the objects of 
reflection, are to me the only originals from whence all 
our ideas take their beginnings.” 

So much, then, for Locke’s notion of how we come by 
knowledge. I quote him at this length, because his view 
was of such critical importance in what followed in all 
European thought. 

You will ask at once, What sort of a real world did 
Locke manage to make out of this material of bare sensa¬ 
tions and reflections? We see, touch, smell, taste this 
our world, and then we reflectively observe of ourselves 
that we are doubting, willing, hoping, loving, hating, think¬ 
ing, and thus we get all our knowledge. That is all the 
mind we have. That is the human understanding. Such 
at least is Locke’s view. But what does it all come to ? 
Is the result a materialism pure and simple, or is it a skep¬ 
ticism ? Not so. Locke was an Englishman ; he saw, 
heard, smelt, tasted, what his fellow-countrymen also did ; 
and he reflected upon all this after much their fashion. 
His world, therefore, is the world of the liberal English 
thinker of his day. He believes in matter and its laws, 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 85 

in God also, and in revelation, in duty and in the human 
rights of the British freeman, and in the Essay he tries 
to show how just such things can be known to us through 
bare seeing, hearing, tasting, and the rest, coupled with 
reflection upon what we are doing. There is nothing 
revolutionary about Locke’s own view of his world, great 
as was the revolution that he prepared. By touch we 
learn that there are substances about us, solid, space-oc¬ 
cupying, numerous, movable. By all our senses we learn 
that these substances have many curious properties, how 
or why brought about, we cannot discover. Sugar is 
sweet; gold is yellow ; various drugs have specific effects 
in curing diseases ; water flows; iron is rigid ; every sub¬ 
stance is as God wills it to be. These things are so, 
because we find them so. Meanwhile, being reflective 
Englishmen, we can’t help observing that all these things 
require God to create them what they are, because, as 
one sees, things always have adequate causes; and our 
minds, too, being realities, must have been made by a 
thinker. Moreover, a fair study of the evidence of reve¬ 
lation will convince any reasonable person of the essential 
truths of the Christian religion, and that is enough. 

You will not find this world of Locke an exciting one. 
But remember, after all, what it is that he has done for us. 
He has tried hard to remove every mystery from the nature 
of human reason. Because innate ideas, the eternal truths 
of Descartes, were mysterious, he has thrown them over¬ 
board. Experience it is that writes everything on the 
blank tablet of the mind. But thus viewing things, Locke 
has only given us a new mystery. Can experience, mere 
smelling, tasting, seeing, together with bare reflection, do 
all this for us, — give us God, religion, reality, our whole 
English world ? Then surely what a marvelous treasure- 
house is this experience itself! Surely ages will be needed 
to comprehend it. Locke cannot have finished it off thus 
in one essay. 


86 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

And indeed he has not done so. His hook is the mere 
beginning both of the psychology of experience, and of 
discussions about the nature and limit of consciousness. 
The truly important argument over Locke’s problems 
was opened by Leibnitz, the great Continental thinker, 
whose views I must entirely pass over, vastly important as 
they are, and that the less unwillingly just now because 
his answer to Locke, written about 1700, was not pub¬ 
lished until many years after his own death. I must, how¬ 
ever, ask you to examine the next step forward in English 
philosophical reflection, the one taken by the admirable 
and fascinating Berkeley. 


IV. 

The world that Locke found with his senses is at once 
too poor and too much encumbered for Berkeley’s young 
enthusiasm. Berkeley is a born child of Plato, a lineal 
descendant of a race whose origin is never very far off, 
and is divine. Men of Berkeley’s type are born to see 
God face to face; and when they see him, they do so 
without fear, without mystical trembling, without being 
driven to dark and lofty speech. They take the whole 
thing as a matter of course. They tell you of it frankly, 
gently, simply, and with a beautiful childlike surprise 
that your eyes are not always as open as their own. 
Meanwhile, they are true philosophers, keen in dialectic, 
skillful in the thrust and parry of debate, a little loqua¬ 
cious, but never wearisome. Of the physical world they 
know comparatively little, but what they know they love 
very much. A very few lines of philosophical research 
they pursue eagerly, minutely, fruitfully; concerning 
others they can make nothing but the most superficial 
remarks. They produce books young, and with marvel¬ 
ous facility. They have a full-fledged system ready by the 
time they are twenty-five. They will write an immortal 
work, as it were, over night. They are, for the rest, through 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


87 


and through poetical. Each one of their essays will be as 
crisp and delicate as a good sonnet. Yet what they lack 
is elaboration, wiliness, and architectural massiveness of 
research. They take after Plato, their father, as to grace 
and ingenuity. His life-long patience and mature pro¬ 
ductiveness they never reach. The world finds them par¬ 
adoxical; refutes them again and again with a certain 
Philistine ferocity; makes naught of them in hundreds of 
learned volumes ; but returns ever afresh to the hopeless 
task of keeping them permanently naught. In the heaven 
of reflection, amongst the philosophical angels who con¬ 
template the beatific vision of the divine essence, such 
spirits occupy neither the place of the archangels, nor of 
those who speed o’er land and sea, nor yet of those who 
only stand and wait. Their office is a less serious one. 
They cast glances now and then at this inspiring aspect 
or at that of the divine essence, sing quite their own song 
in its praise, find little in most of the other angels that can 
entertain them, and spend their time for the most part in 
gentle private musings, many of which (for so Berkeley’s 
own portrait suggests to me) they apparently find far too 
pretty to be uttered at all. We admire them, we may even 
love them; yet no one would call them precisely heroes of 
contemplation. They themselves shed no tears, but they 
also begin no revolutions, are apostles of no world-wide 
movements. 

Berkeley’s grandly simple accomplishment, as you 
know, lay in his observation that in the world of the senses, 
in the world of experience, as Locke knew it, there was 
properly no such thing as material substance discoverable 
at all. The world of sense-experience, said Berkeley, is a 
world of ideas. I have an idea, say of this fruit. It is a 
complex idea. The fruit is round, soft, pleasant to the 
taste, orange-colored, and the rest. But then, as you see, 
all these things that I know about the fruit are just my 
ideas. Were I in the dark, the fruit would have no color. 


88 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Do I refuse to bite it, the taste of it remains a bare possi¬ 
bility, not a fact. And so as to all the other properties of 
the fruit. All these exist for me in so far as I have ideas 
of them. Have I no idea of a thing, then it exists not for 
me. This is Berkeley’s fundamental thought, but he does 
not leave it in such absolute and crude simplicity as this. 

His deeper significance lies in the fact that he carries 
out in a new field an analysis of our inner life, namely, of 
a portion of the process of knowledge. His grandly sim¬ 
ple idea, here applied, leads to very engaging results; but 
they are results which no other philosopher would be 
likely to accept without at once carrying them further 
than did Berkeley. The young student of Trinity College 
early became fascinated with the problem of the theory of 
vision. We seem to see objects about us in a space of 
three dimensions. These objects look solid, move about, 
stand in space relations to one another. But now, after all, 
how can we possibly see distance ? Distance runs directly 
outward from my eyes ; my eyes are at the surface of my 
body, and a distant object is not; my eyes are affected 
where they are, and, for the rest, not the distance of the 
opposite wall as such affects me, but the wall in so far as 
rays of light come from it. All this even Locke’s man 
of plain sense has to admit. How, then, if distance it¬ 
self is not one of my visual sensations, if distance is n’t 
itself color or light, how can I still see distance? For all 
that I see is after all not even the object, but only the 
color and light of the object. This is Berkeley’s pro¬ 
blem about vision. His answer was early this: I don’t 
really see distance. What I see is something about the 
color or shape of the distant object, or better still about 
the feelings that accompany in me the act of sight, — 
something which is to me a sign of distance. A distant 
orange is n’t as big as a near one. That is one sign of dis¬ 
tance then, namely, the size for me of my idea of a patch 
of color which I see when I look at the orange. Again, 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


89 


very distant objects, such as mountains, are known to be 
distant because they look to me blue. In short, to sum 
up, my apparent seeing of distance is n’t any direct seeing 
of distance at all. It is a reading of the language of 
sight, as this is exhibited to my eyes by the colors and 
forms of things. A certain look of things, a certain 
group of signs, which I have learned, by long experience, 
to interpret, tells me how far oft these things about me 
are. Distance is n’t known directly. It is read as we 
read a language, read by interpreting the signs of the 
sense of sight. And as with distance, so with solidity. I 
don’t really see things as solid. The solid things don’t 
wander in through my eyes to my soul. But there are 
signs of solidity about the look of the things, signs that 
you learn to copy when you learn to draw in perspective, 
and to imitate the relief of objects; these signs are the 
language of the sense of sight. You learn, when you 
come to comprehend this language, that if a thing looks 
in a certain way, has a certain relief of colors, a certain 
perspective arrangement of its outlines, that then, I say, 
it will feel solid if you go up to it and touch it. Infants 
don’t know all this until they have learned to read the 
language of vision. Hence they don’t see things as solid 
for a good while, don’t judge distances accurately, have 
no eye for a space of three dimensions. 

Seeing, then, is reading, is interpreting a world-lan¬ 
guage, is anticipating how things will feel to your touch 
by virtue of the signs given by the color, light, relief, per¬ 
spective, of things. Such is Berkeley’s view, and as far 
as it goes, it is obviously true. But he is not content to 
leave his thought here. He goes further. What is all 
my life of experience, my seeing, feeling, touching, mov¬ 
ing about, examining my world ? Is n’t it from first to 
last a learning to read the language of things ? Is n’t it a 
learning to anticipate one thing by virtue of the signs 
that are given of its presence by another ? Yes, all experi- 


90 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


ence is after all learning to read. And this reading, what 
is it ? It is merely rightly and rationally putting together 
the ideas which my world gives me. These ideas come in 
certain orders, follow certain laws. I learn these laws, 
and thus I read my world. I have one idea, say the glow 
of a fire. It suggests to me another idea, namely, that in 
case I go near the fire I shall feel warm. All experience, 
then, is a learning how my ideas ought to go together; it 
is a learning that upon one idea another will follow under 
certain circumstances. What, then, is this world of my 
experience ? Is it anything but the world of ideas and of 
their laws ? What existence has my world for me apart 
from my ideas of it? What existence can any world 
have apart from the thought of some thinker for whom 
it exists ? Whose language, then, am I reading in this 
world before me ? Whose ideas are these that experience 
impresses upon me? Are they not God’s ideas? Is it 
not his language that I read in nature? Is not all my 
life a talking with God ? 

“ Some truths there are,” says Berkeley, “ so near and 
obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes 
to see them. Such I take this important one to be, to 
wit, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the 
earth, in a word, all those bodies which compose the 
mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence with¬ 
out mind; that their being is, to be perceived or known; 
that consequently so long as they are not actually per¬ 
ceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any 
other created spirit, they must either have no existence at 
all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit.” 

This is Berkeley’s interpretation and extension of 
Locke’s thought. I don’t ask you to accept or to reject it, 
I only ask you to see once more how it holds together. Let 
us review it. My experience is a learning to read my 
world. What is my world ? Merely the sum total of 
my ideas, of my thoughts, feelings, sights, sounds, colors, 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


91 


tastes. I read these when one of them becomes sign to 
me of another, when the idea of a glow tells me of the yet 
unfelt warmth that a fire will arouse in me if I approach 
it, when the ideas of forms and shadows warn me how a 
solid thing will feel if I touch it. My ideas and their 
laws, this is all my reality. But then surely I am not the 
only existence there is. No, indeed. The things about 
me are indeed only my ideas; but I am not the author 
of these ideas. This language of experience, those signs 
of the senses, which I decipher—I did not produce them. 
Who writes, then, this language? Who forces on my 
mind the succession of my ideas ? Who spreads out 
the scroll of those experiences before me which in their 
totality constitute the choir of heaven and the furniture 
of earth ? Berkeley responds readily. The sources of 
my ideas are two: my fellow-beings, who speak to me 
with the natural voice, and God, who talks to me in the 
language of the sense. “ When,” says Berkeley, “ I 
deny sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do 
not mean my mind in particular, but all minds. Now 
it is plain they have an existence exterior to my mind, 
since I find them by experience to be independent of 
it. There is some other mind wherein they exist, dur¬ 
ing the intervals between the time of my perceiving them, 
as likewise they did before my birth, and would do after 
my supposed annihilation. And as the same is true with 
regard to all other finite created spirits, it necessarily fol¬ 
lows, there is an omnipresent eternal mind , which 
knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to 
our view in such a manner, and according to such rules, 
as Pie himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the 
laws of nature .” 

Plere is the famous idealism of Berkeley. Never was 
philosophical idealism more simply stated. Nowhere is 
there a better introduction to a doctrine at once paradoxi¬ 
cal and plausible, namely, the idealistic scheme of things, 


92 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

than in Berkeley’s early essays. They are favorites—* 
these essays — of all young students of philosophy. As 
you read them, unprepared, you first say, How wild a 
paradox! How absurdly opposed to common sense! 
Then you read further and say, How plausible this Berke¬ 
ley is I How charming his style ! How clear he makes 
his paradoxes ! Perhaps, after all, they are n’t paradoxes, 
but mere rewordings of what we all mean. He knows a 
real world of facts, too. Nobody is surer of the truths 
of experience, nobody is firmer in his convictions of an 
outer reality, than Berkeley. Only this outer reality — 
what is it but God directly talking to us, directly impress¬ 
ing upon us these ideas of the “ choir of heaven and fur¬ 
niture of earth ? ” In sense, in experience, we have God. 
He is in matter. Matter, in fact, is a part of his own 
self: it is his manifested will, his plan for our education, 
his voice speaking to us, warning, instructing, guiding, 
amusing, disciplining, blessing us, with a series of orderly 
and significant experiences. Well, I say, as you read 
further, the beauty of Berkeley’s statement impresses you, 
you are half persuaded that you might come to believe 
this; and lo! suddenly, as you read, you do believe it, if 
only for an hour, and then, in a curious fashion, the 
whole thing comes to look almost commonplace. It is so 
obvious, you say, this notion that we only know our own 
ideas, so obvious that it was hardly worth while to write 
it down. After all, everybody believes that! As for the 
notion of God talking to us, through all our senses, that 
is very pretty and poetical, but is there anything very 
novel about the notion ? It is the old design argument 
over again. 

So I say, your mood alters as you read Berkeley. The 
value of his doctrine, for our present purposes, lies in its 
place in this history of the rediscovery of the inner life 
which we are following in this lecture. Of the truth of 
Berkeley’s doctrine I have just now nothing to say. I am 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 93 

simply narrating to you Berkeley’s experience of spiritual 
things. And his experience was this : that our conscious¬ 
ness of outer reality is a more subtle and complex thing 
than the previous age had suspected, so that the real world 
must be very different from the assumed substantial and 
mathematical world of the seventeenth century, and so that 
our inner life of sense and of reason needs yet a new and 
a deeper analysis. Everything in this whole period 
makes, you see, for the study of this inner life. It is no 
matter whether you are a philosopher, and write essays on 
the “ Principles of Human Knowledge,” or whether you 
are a heroine in an eighteenth-century novel, and write 
sentimental letters to a friend; you are part of the same 
movement. The spirit is dissatisfied with the mathemati¬ 
cal order, and feels friendless among the eternities of the 
seventeenth-century thought. The spirit wants to be at 
home with itself, well-friended in the comprehension of its 
inner processes. It loves to be confidential in its heart 
outpourings, keen in its analysis, humane in its attitude 
towards life. And to be part of this new process is Berke¬ 
ley’s significance. 

Y. 

But now, if you are to enjoy the inner life, you must 
bear also its burdens and its doubts. To become sure of 
yourself, you must first doubt yourself. And this doubt, 
this skepticism, which self-analysis always involves, who 
could express it better than the great Scotchman, David 
Hume ? Hume is, I think, next to Hobbes, the greatest 
of British speculative thinkers, Berkeley occupying the 
third place in order of rank. I cannot undertake to 
describe to you in this place the real historical signifi¬ 
cance of Hume, his subtlety, his fearlessness, his fine 
analysis of certain of the deepest problems, his place as 
the inspirer of Kant’s thought, his whole value as meta¬ 
physical teacher of his time. What you will see in him 
is merely the merciless skeptic, and, in this superficial 


94 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


sketch of the rediscovery of the inner consciousness, I 
don’t ask you to see more. Hume accepted Locke’s 
belief that reason is merely the recorder of experience. 
He carries out this view to its remotest consequences. 
Our minds consist, as he says, of impressions and ideas. 
By impressions he means the experiences of sense; by 
ideas he means the remembered copies of these experi¬ 
ences. You see, feel, smell, taste ; and you remember 
having seen, felt, tasted or smelt. That is all. You have 
no other knowledge. Upon some of your ideas, namely 
those of quantity and number, you can reason, and can 
even discover novel and necessary truth about them. 
This is owing to the peculiarity of these ideas and of the 
impressions on which they are founded. For these ideas, 
also, even all the subtleties of mathematical science, are 
faded and blurred impressions of sense. And, as it 
chances, on just these faded impressions you can reason. 
But Berkeley was wrong in thinking that you can by 
searching find out God, or anything else supersensual. 
Science concerns matters of fact, as the senses give them, 
and ends with these. 

With this general view in mind, let us examine, in 
Hume’s fashion, certain of the most familiar conceptions 
of human reason. Hume is afraid of nothing, not even 
of the presumptions at the basis of physical science. 
Matters of fact he respects, but not universal principles. 
“ There are,” says Hume, “ no ideas . . . more obscure 
than those of power, force, or necessary connection.” Let 
us look a little more closely at these ideas. Let us clear 
them up if we can. How useful they seem. How much 
we hear in exact science about something called the law 
of causation, which says that there is a necessary connec¬ 
tion between causes and effects, that given natural condi¬ 
tions have a “power” to bring to pass certain results, 
that the forces of nature must work as they do. Well, 
apply to such sublime and far-reaching ideas, — just such 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


95 


ideas, you will remember, as seemed to Spinoza so signifi¬ 
cant,— apply to them Hume’s simple criterion. Ideas, in 
order to have a good basis, must, Hume declares, stand 
for matters of fact, given to us in the senses. u It is 
impossible for us to think of anything which we have not 
antecedently felt , either by our external or internal senses.” 
“ By what invention, then,” says Hume, “ can we throw 
light ” upon ideas that, being simple, still pretend to be 
authoritative, “ and render them altogether precise and 
determinate to our intellectual view ? ” Answer : “ Pro¬ 
duce the impressions or original sentiments from which 
the ideas are copied.” These impressions will “ admit of 
no ambiguity.” So, then, let us produce the original im¬ 
pression from which the idea of causation, of necessary 
connection, or of power is derived. You say that in 
nature there is and must be necessity. Very well, let us 
ask ourselves afresh the questions that we asked of Locke. 
Did you ever see necessity? Did you ever hear or touch 
causation ? Did you ever taste or smell necessary connec¬ 
tion? Name us the original impression whence comes 
your idea. “ When,” says Hume, “ we look about us 
towards external objects, and consider the operation of 
causes, we are never able, in any single instance, to dis¬ 
cover any power or necessary connection, any quality 
which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one 
an infallible consequence of the other. We only find that 
the one does actually in fact follow the other. The im¬ 
pulse of one billiard ball is attended with motion in the 
second. That is the whole that appears to the outward 
senses.” “ In reality, there is no part of matter that does 
ever by its sensible qualities discover any power or energy, 
or give us ground to imagine that it could produce any¬ 
thing,” until we have found out by experience what hap¬ 
pens in consequence of its presence. Thus outer sense 
gives us facts, but no necessary laws, no true causation, 
no real connection of events. 


96 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

We must, then, get our idea of power, of necessary con¬ 
nection, from within. And so, in fact, many have thought 
that we do. If in outer nature I am only impressed by 
matters of fact about billiard balls and other such things, 
and if there I never learn of causation, do I not, per¬ 
chance, directly feel my own true power, my own causal 
efficacy, my own will, making acts result in a necessary 
way from my purposes ? No, answers Hume. If I ex¬ 
amine carefully I find that my own deeds also are merely 
matters of fact, with nothing causally efficacious about my 
own conscious nature to make them obviously necessary. 
After all, “ is there any principle in nature more myste¬ 
rious than the union of soul with body?” “Were we 
empowered,” adds Hume, “ to remove mountains, or con¬ 
trol the planets in their orbit, this extensive authority 
would not be more extraordinary, or more beyond our 
comprehension,” than is the bare matter of fact that we 
now can control our bodies by our will. In inner expe¬ 
rience, then, just as in outer, we get no direct impression 
of how causes produce effects. We only see that things 
do often happen in regular ways. In experience, then, 
“ all events seem entirely loose and separate. One event 
follows another; but we can never observe any tie be¬ 
tween them. They seem conjoined , but never connected. 
But as we can have no idea of anything which never ap¬ 
peared to our outward sense or inward sentiment, the 
necessary conclusion seems to be, that we have no idea of 
connection or power at all, and that these words are abso¬ 
lutely without any meaning.” From this seeming conclu¬ 
sion, Hume makes, indeed, an escape, but one that is, in 
fact, not less skeptical than his result as first reached. 
The true original of our idea of power, and so of causa¬ 
tion, he says, is simply this, that “ after a repetition of 
similar instances, the mind is carried, by habit, upon the 
appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, 
and to believe that it will exist.” “The first time a 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 


97 


man saw the communication of motion by impulse, as by 
the shock of the two billiard balls, he could not pronounce 
that the one event was connected, but only that it was 
conjoined, with the other. After he has observed several 
instances of this nature, he then pronounces them to be 
connected . What alteration has happened to give rise to 
this new idea of connection f Nothing but that now he 
feels these two events to be connected in his imagination.” 
Custom, then, mere habit of mind, is the origin of the idea 
of causation. We see no necessity in the world. We 
only feel it there, because that is our habit of mind, our 
fashion of mentally regarding an often-repeated expe¬ 
rience of similar successions. 

The importance of all this skepticism lies, as you of 
course see, in its removal from our fact-world of just the 
principles that the seventeenth century had found so in¬ 
spiring. “ It is of the nature of reason,” Spinoza had 
said, “ to regard things as necessary.” Upon that rock 
he had built his faith. His wisdom had reposed secure 
in God, in whom were all things, just because God’s 
nature was the highest form of necessity, the law of laws. 
And now comes Hume, and calls this “ nature of reason ” 
a mere feeling, founded on habit, a product of our imagi¬ 
nation, no matter of fact at all. What becomes, then, of 
Spinoza’s divine order ? Has philosophy fallen by its 
own hands? Is the eternal in which we had trusted 
really, after all, but the mass of the flying and discon¬ 
nected impressions of sense ? All crumbles at the touch of 
this criticism of Hume’s. All becomes but the aggregate 
of the disconnected sense-impressions. Nay, if we find 
the Holy Grail itself, it, too, will fade and crumble into 
dust. Hume is aware of some such result. He skillfully 
and playfully veils the extreme consequences at times by 
the arts of his beautiful dialectic. But he none the less 
rejoices in it, with all the fine joy of the merciless foe of 
delusions: — matters of fact, relations of ideas, — these 


98 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


are all that his doctrine leaves us. “When,” he once 
says, “ we run through libraries, persuaded of these prin¬ 
ciples, what havoc must we make ? If we take in our 
hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for 
instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reason¬ 
ing concerning quantity or number t No, Does it con¬ 
tain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of 
fact and existence f No. Commit it then to the flames, 
for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” 


VI. 

Hume represents thus, indeed, the extreme of purely 
philosophical skepticism in the eighteenth century. 
Others, to be sure, outside of the ranks of the philoso¬ 
phers, went further in many ways, and were rebels or 
scoffers in their own fashion, far more aggressive than his. 
But Hume’s thought is in its result as fruitful as in its 
content it is negative. The spirit, you see, has become 
anxious to know its own nature. After all, can we live 
by merely assuming the innate ideas? Can even Spi¬ 
noza’s wisdom save us from doubt? And yet this doubt 
does n’t mean mere waywardness. It means longing for 
self-consciousness. And in the last third of the century 
this longing took, as we shall next time learn, new and 
positive forms. The inner life, to be sure, has appeared 
so far as a very capricious thing, after all. Study it by 
mere analysis of its experiences, as Hume did, and in this 
its capriciousness it will seem to shrivel to nothing under 
your hands. Where you expected it to be wealthiest, it 
turns out to be poorest. It is mere sense, mere feeling, 
mere sophistry and illusion. But is this the end ? No, 
it is rather but the beginning of a new and a higher 
philosophy. The spirit is more than mere experience. 
Locke’s account of the inner life is only half the truth. 
And what the other half is, Kant and his successors shall 
teach us. The age of poetry and of history — of a new 


THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE. 99 

natural science, also, yes, even this our own century — 
shall take up afresh the task that Hume rejected as im¬ 
possible. The revolutionary period shall first rediscover 
passion, shall produce Goethe’s “ Faust,” and shall regen¬ 
erate Europe. Historical research, reviving, shall prove 
to the spirit the significance of his own earthly past. 
Science, entering upon new realms, shall formulate the 
idea of cosmical evolution. No longer Spinoza’s world, 
but a changing, a glowingly passionate and tragic world, 
of moral endeavor, of strife, of growth, and of freedom, 
shall be conceived by men ; and meanwhile, in Kant and 
in his successors, as we shall find, a more fitting philoso¬ 
phy will arise to formulate with all of Hume’s keen dia¬ 
lectic, with all of Locke’s love of human nature, and still 
with all of Spinoza’s reverence for an absolute rationality 
in things, something of the significance of our modern 
life. 

Remember, however, finally, that if the skepticism of 
the eighteenth century is to be gotten rid of, this will only 
be by transcending it, living through and beyond it, not 
by neglecting or by simply refuting it, from without. Phi¬ 
losophical insight, however partial, is never to be refuted. 
You can transcend it, you can make it part of a larger 
life, but it always remains as such a part. The genuine 
spirit includes all that was true and earnest in the doubt¬ 
ing spirit. The only way to get rid of a philosophic 
doubt, in its discouraging aspect, is to see that, such as it 
is, it already implies a larger truth. The great spirit 
says to us, like Emerson’s “ Brahma,” — 

“ They reckon ill who leave me out; 

When me they fly, I am the wings ; 

I am the doubter and the doubt.” 

And this, namely, the inevitableness and the true spir¬ 
ituality of genuine doubting, is the great lesson that the 
eighteenth century, in its transition to Kant, teaches us. 
It is a lesson well to be remembered in our own day. 


100 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


when, notwithstanding the vast accomplishments of recent 
research, there is a sense in which we, too, live in a world 
of doubt, but live there only that we may learn to con¬ 
quer and possess it, all its doubts and its certainties, all 
its truth. In doubt we come to see our illusion; the 
phantoms of the night of thought vanish; but the new 
light comes. The old world dies, but only to rise again 
to the immortality of a higher existence. The spirit de¬ 
stroys its former creations, shatters its idols, and laments 
their loss. But, as in “ Faust,” the chorus still sings : — 

“ Thou hast it destroyed, 

The beautiful world, 

With powerful fist : 

In ruin’t is hurled, 

By the blow of a demigod shattered ! 

The scattered 

Fragments into the Void we carry, 

Deploring 

The beauty perished beyond restoring. 

Mightier 

For the children of men, 

Brightlier 
Build it again, 

In thine own bosom build it anew ! 

Bid the new career 
Commence, 

With clearer sense, 

And the new songs of cheer 
Be sung thereto ! ” 

Such a building anew of the lost universe in the bosom of 
the human spirit, it was the mission of Kant to begin. 


LECTUKE IV. 


KANT. 

We saw in the last lecture how the self-analysis of the 
eighteenth century inevitably tended towards the redis¬ 
covery of passion, and finally towards the great revolu¬ 
tionary movement, in life and in literature, with which 
the century closed. But we also found that the same 
Lockean tendency was bound to produce a philosophical 
skepticism whereof Hume was our chief example. Hume 
stated the essence of Locke’s theory with an almost brutal 
simplicity of formulation. We know, he said, impressions, 
which come to us through sense, and ideas, which are the 
copies of impressions. About some ideas we can reason. 
These form the subject-matter of our only demonstrative 
science, mathematics. All our other science concerns 
matters of fact, that is, recorded impressions of our expe¬ 
rience, with such rational observations as we can make 
upon them. Does the inner life pretend to more than 
this, to more than a knowledge of impressions and ideas, 
— then what is this pretense but sophistry and illusion ? 
The inner life, under this merciless analysis, shrivels up, 
as it were, into a mere series of chance experiences. The 
sacred faiths of humanity, do they record seen and felt 
matters of fact ? The moral law, is it more than a feeling 
in the mind of the sympathetic subject ? Hume is indeed 
merciless; but his mercilessness is, after all, the clear in¬ 
sight of a reflective man. Bare experience of the Lockean 
sort does indeed contain no such supreme rationality as 
earlier thinkers had found there. What Hume showed 


102 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


was that unless there is more in experience than Locke’s 
view permitted, it to contain, the hope of any transcendent 
knowledge or faith for humanity is indeed gone. That 
Hume showed this is his great merit, for hereby he led 
the way to Kant. 

i. 

When I mention the name of Kant, who forms our 
special topic to-day, I introduce to you one whose thought 
arouses more suggestions in the mind of a philosophical 
student than cluster about any other modern thinker. 
One despairs of telling you all or any great part of what 
Kant has meant to one in the course of a number of years 
of metaphysical study; but let me still try to suggest a 
little of Kant’s place in such a line of work. One hears 
of Kant early in one’s life as a student of philosophy. He 
is said to be hard, perhaps a little dangerous (a thing 
which of course attracts one hugely !). He is said to be 
also certainly typical of German speculation, and always 
worthy of one’s efforts if one means to philosophize at all. 
Perhaps one, therefore, first tries him in translation, with 
a sense that, even if one’s German is not yet free, some¬ 
thing must already be done to win him. The “ Critique 
of Pure Reason,” how attractive the name! How wise 
one will be after criticising the pure reason through the 
reading of five or six hundred pages of close print! 
There is an old translation of Kant, in Bohn’s Library, 
by a certain Meiklejohn. One begins with that. The 
English is heavy, not to say shocking ; but the first effect 
of the reading is soon a splendid sense of power, a feeling 
of the exhaustiveness of the treatment, of the skill and 
subtlety and fearlessness of this Kant. What seems to 
be a good deal of the book — not the chief part, indeed —■ 
one can even fairly grasp at the first reading. In fact, 
so persuasive, to certain minds, is the general external 
appearance of Kant’s method of work, that there are stu* 
dents who, on their first superficial acquaintance with 


KANT. 


103 


him, really fancy that they have actually comprehended 
the whole thing at one stroke. I myself have heard this 
feeling expressed by diligent young readers, who have 
assured me, after their first trial of the “ Critique,” that, 
as they supposed, it must be that they had somehow failed 
to understand Kant, for whereas people said he was hard, 
they themselves had n’t found anything very difficult in 
the book at all. To their great alarm, as it were, they 
had n’t even been puzzled. Yet when such persons come 
to read Kant a second time, I fear that they usually find 
themselves considerably puzzled; or rather, I should say 
that I hope so. Puzzle is a sensation that soon comes, 
when one begins to examine Kant more cautiously and 
worthily. The first superficial joy in his power, in his 
skill, in his subtlety, in his fearlessness, fades away. One 
sees his actual doctrine looming afar off, a mountain yet 
to be climbed. On nearer approach, one finds the moun¬ 
tain well wooded; and the woods have thick underbrush. 
The paths lose themselves in the dark valleys, leading 
this way and that, with most contradictory windings. 
Kant is a pedantic creature after all, one says. He loves 
hard words. He takes a mass of them, — as one of 
his critics fiercely says, he takes a mass of Latin terms 
ending in tion , and translates them into so many equiva¬ 
lent vernacular terms, ending in the German in heit and 
Iceit , and he calls this sort of thing philosophy ! Getting 
such things through the medium of an English transla¬ 
tion does n’t improve them. One begins to anathematize 
the poor translator, Meiklejohn, in fear lest one should 
blaspheme instead the sacred name of the immortal Kant. 
One finally concludes that this is a book full of great 
insights and of noble passages, but that the real connec¬ 
tions are n’t to be made out until one shall have fought 
the good fight in German. And so one drops the subject 
until one’s German shall be free. 

That happy time comes. One has first read Schopen- 


104 THE SPIKIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

hauer, whose German, to use a comparison of Jean Paul 
Richter’s, is as limpid as a mountain lake that lies be¬ 
neath gloomy cliffs, under a clear and frosty sky. One 
has even plunged down the tumultuous streams of Fichte’s 
eloquence, where the frail bark of a student’s understand¬ 
ing is indeed occasionally rather near to destruction, but 
whence a man still usually escapes with his wits. Now it 
is time to return to Kant. One hereupon falls upon the 
“ Critique ” with new zest, and finds that, as reading goes 
in a studious but rather busy and distracted life, one can 
at length read the book through in about three years, and 
can feel that thereafter he might do well to begin and read 
it again. After doing so, one lays it aside for a spell, 
and so returns afresh, from year to year, for a longer oi 
shorter season, to the fascinating but baffling task. In 
Germany, where there has been a revival of interest in 
Kant, during the past twenty years, reading the “ Crb 
tique ” has come to take rank, so to speak, as one of the 
liberal professions. There are learned men who, in all 
appearance, do nothing else. The habit is dangerously 
fascinating. The Kant devotee never knows when to 
stop. When I studied in Germany as a young college 
graduate, some fifteen years ago, it was my fortune to 
meet one of the most learned and many-sided of the new 
philosophical doctors of the day, who was just then pre¬ 
paring for a docentship. He was a man who promised, 
as one might say, almost everything ; who wrote and pub¬ 
lished essays of remarkable breadth and skill, and who 
was especially noticeable for his wide range of work. 
Some years later, it unhappily occurred to him to begin 
printing a commentary on Kant’s “ Critique of Pure 
Reason.” He planned the commentary for completion in 
four volumes octavo. Of these four he published, not 
long afterwards, the first, a volume of several hundred 
large pages, wherein he deals — with Kant’s introduc¬ 
tory chapter. Since then my former acquaintance is lost. 


KANT. 


105 


The final volumes of the commentary have never ap¬ 
peared, although he has now been at work upon them 
more than ten years. How many volumes will really be 
needed to complete the task, only the “ destroyer of de¬ 
lights and terminator of felicities,” whom the Arabian 
Nights’ tales always love to mention as they close, to wit, 
Death himself, can ever determine. The thorough student 
of Kant is, so to speak, a Tannhauser, close shut in his 
Venusberg. You hunt for him fruitlesssly in all the outer 
world. Worse than Tannhauser he is, for you can never 
get him out. Pilgrims’ choruses chant, and waiting Eliza¬ 
beths mourn for him, in vain. As for me, I, as you per¬ 
ceive, am no reader of Kant, in the strict sense, at all. I 
won a doctor’s degree, years since, in part by writing a 
course of lectures upon the “ Critique.” I have since 
come to see that those lectures were founded upon a seri¬ 
ous, I might say an entire, misinterpretation of Kant’s 
meaning. Since then I have repented, as you also ob¬ 
serve, of this misinterpretation, and, as I might add, of 
several others. I love still to lecture to my college classes 
on Kant. I think that possibly I know a little about 
him. But then, after all, Kant, you see, is Kant; and 
the Lord made him, and many other wondrous works be¬ 
sides ; and it takes time to find such things out. 

You will understand therefore, at once, that I can have 
no intention of making clear, within the limits of a single 
lecture, a doctrine so subtle and involved as this. But 
then the justification of my undertaking in these lectures 
is wholly that I attempt, not to describe the philosophers 
and their opinions as the monuments of technical skill and 
of exhaustive research which they are, but to set forth to 
you something of the temperament which they embody. 
Kant shall be for us a character in a story, an attitude 
towards the spiritual concerns of humanity. As such 
you want to know him; as such only can I attempt here 
to describe him. 


106 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


II. 

The man Kant is an old subject for literary portraiture. 
It is hard to say anything in the least new about him. 
He was born in 1724, in the city of Konigsberg, in the 
province of East Prussia, and never once in his life trav¬ 
eled beyond that province. His family was poor; his 
father was of Scotch descent, and was a saddler, and in 
religion a pietist. Both Kant’s parents lived a narrow 
and glowing religious life, cheerful, harmonious, and, in a 
worldly sense, dispassionate. At school Kant attracted 
such attention that a university course of study followed, 
in Konigsberg, of course, and this led him to an academic 
career. At the outset of his literary work Kant is a curi¬ 
ous mixture of the pedant, the many-sided student, the 
young man of literary skill, and the independent investi¬ 
gator. His earliest essay was in philosophical physics, 
and was in more senses than one a failure. In 1755, he 
published, however, a remarkable paper on the “ General 
Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,” wherein he 
anticipated the essential features of the nebular hypothe¬ 
sis which Laplace afterwards developed. Up to this 
time he had been a private tutor. Thenceforth he lec¬ 
tured as privat-docent at the university until his appoint¬ 
ment as professor in 1770. Promotion, as one sees, was 
thereabouts slow, and Kant was perhaps at first over¬ 
looked by higher officials, whom he never sought to 
please. During these earlier years he was a man of 
considerable literary skill, but in philosophy was still 
under the influence of the reigning dogmatic school. 
The poet Herder, who heard him as docent, speaks very 
highly of his power in those days as a lecturer. Of Kant 
in his young prime we have a portrait, showing him 
at the age of forty-four. More common is the portrait 
taken much later in life. Both show us the spare, small, 
insignificant-appearing man. He was of frail health, but 


KANT. 


107 


seldom or never ill. His height was barely beyond five 
feet; as he grew older he became more and more an 
almost fleshless but very cheerful shadow of a man, all 
mind and no body, genial, gossiping, a lover of a small 
but very clever circle of friends, a great reader of books 
of travel, a passionate student, strange to say, of the man¬ 
ners and customs of various and distant lands and peoples, 
topics upon which he loved to lecture. His bachelor life 
grew, meanwhile, more and more methodical. As he grew 
older, thought absorbed him more and more. For more 
than a decade, namely, from 1770 to 1781, he published 
very little, and meditated solely his “ Critique of Pure 
Reason,” gladly free, as he once says, from the obligation 
of defending early and hastily written essays in philoso¬ 
phy. Now he became indeed an original thinker. His 
loneliness of thought grew almost oppressive. To his 
friends he apparently said only a little of the new doc¬ 
trine that was forming in his mind. His lectures became 
less eloquent; his inner life grew ever deeper, stiller, — 
not melancholy, but hidden away, involved, problematic. 
Henceforth, moreover, his style gravely suffers. The 
genial soul shows itself again and again in the great 
“ Critique,” in chance figures, in brilliant but too brief 
passages. Yet on the whole Kant’s writing is henceforth 
burdened, as it were, with the weight of his whole new 
world. His sentences groan beneath their treasures. He 
works beneath the earth, in the mines of humanity’s gold. 1 
Great thoughts glitter in the rich quartz of his medita¬ 
tion, but only with toil and suffering is this gold to be 
extracted. From the first issue of the “ Critique ” men 

1 In a remarkable note, published in Benno Erdmann’s edition of 
Kant’s Reflexionen (vol. ii. p. 6), Kant himself says, of his own style, 
“ Es scheint zwar nichts geschmackswidriger zu sein als die Metaphy- 
sik, aber die Zierrate die an der Schonheit glanzen, lagen erstlich in 
dunkeln Griiften, wenigstens sah man sie zuerst durch die finstere 
Werkstatt des Kiinstlers.” 


108 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

complained of Kant’s obscurity; years later Herder la¬ 
mented bitterly tbe lost instructor of bis youth, the man 
whom he used to be able to comprehend, but of whom 
now he could make almost nothing, and whose doctrine 
he sternly opposed. The first impression that the great 
“ Critique ” produced was of wonder and of a sort of 
puzzled dread. Some said, “ This man has destroyed all 
faith. He doubts everything. It is a dangerous book; 
it is terrible.” Others said, “ This is Berkeley’s ideal¬ 
ism over again.” Many said, “ Whatever it is, it is 
quite unreadable.” But erelong the thought came home 
to people that all this was not only novel, but vastly en¬ 
lightening. The universities took up the book. The 
great literary men read it. Schiller himself was in many 
respects almost revolutionized by it, and by the Kantian 
works that followed it. The age of the revolution was 
ripe for it. Young men became fascinated by it, and 
within twenty-five years the “ Critique ” had converted a 
people decidedly unproductive in philosophy into the typi¬ 
cally metaphysical nation of Europe, so that, as Jean 
Paul said, while God had given to the French the land 
and to the English the sea, he had granted to the Ger¬ 
mans the empire of the air. 

Meanwhile, Kant, gradually wasting away in body, ate 
his one meal daily, walked over his regular path every 
afternoon, lectured genially but intricately to his classes, 
and wrote book after book until some years later than 
1790. Old age was now approaching fast. This frail 
body could not very well endure the coming enemy. Kant 
grew less productive and more methodical. There is a 
well-known passage by Heine, 1 wherein this daily life of 
Kant is sketched: — 

“ The life of Immanuel Kant,” says Heine, “ is hard to 
describe ; he had indeed neither life nor history in the 

1 Quoted, also, by Professor Edward Caird, in liis Philosophy oj 
Immanuel Kant, 2d ed. vol. i. p. 63. 


KANT. 


109 


proper sense of the words. He lived an abstract, me¬ 
chanical, old-bachelor existence, in a quiet, remote street 
of Konigsberg, an old city at the northeastern boundary 
of Germany. I do not believe that the great cathedral- 
clock of that city accomplished its day’s work in a less 
passionate and more regular way than its countryman, 
Immanuel Kant. Rising from bed, coffee-drinking, writ¬ 
ing, lecturing, eating, walking, everything had its fixed 
time; and the neighbors knew that it must be exactly 
half past four when they saw Professor Kant, in his gray 
^coat, with his cane in his hand, step out of his house-door, 
and move towards the little lime-tree avenue, which is 
named, after him, the Philosopher’s Walk. Eight times 
he walked up and down that walk at every season of the 
year, and when the weather was bad, or the gray clouds 
threatened rain, his servant, old Lampe, was seen anx¬ 
iously following him with a large umbrella under his 
arm, like an image of Providence. 

“ Strange contrast between the outer life of the man 
and his world-destroying thought. Of a truth, if the citi¬ 
zens of Konigsberg had had any inkling of the meaning 
of that thought, they would have shuddered before him 
as before an executioner. But the good people saw no¬ 
thing in him but a professor of philosophy, and when he 
passed at the appointed hour, they gave him friendly 
greetings — and set their watches.” 

hi. 

To this characterization of Heine’s, which has become 
almost classic, it is hard to add anything besides what 
every reader of literary gossip also knows, unless one 
enters into details that would detain us here too long. 
Still, we must go yet a little farther. This odd and 
gentle little man was, as you already see, a singular com¬ 
bination of the keen-witted analyst and the humane lover 
of all things human. Give him an old problem, or a 


110 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

well-known abstract conception, such as the idea of wis¬ 
dom or of justice, and he would quickly show you his 
analytic skill by mentioning a long series of distinctions, 
of aspects, of possible ways of defining or of stating the 
thing, — so long a series, and often so dry, that you would 
at first be likely to suspect him of genuine pedantry. 
And yet this seeming pedant — what a lover he is of 
books of travel, of descriptions of live men, and of con¬ 
crete affairs! He has indeed never traveled beyond his 
simple and quiet little province; but yet, as we just saw, 
he loves to lecture, and with a wide knowledge, too, upon 
geography and upon anthropology. Physical science also, 
after the fashions of his day, he knows very fairly. In 
that early essay he has anticipated Laplace’s nebular 
hypothesis. Moreover, he has published a long paper on 
the sentiments of the sublime and beautiful. When he 
speculates, he shows himself as many-sided as he is keen. 
His systematic plans are vast. When, in his old age, he 
has published half a dozen important and varied treatises 
upon different and fundamental departments of philoso¬ 
phy, he still laments the fragmentariness of his work, and 
still promises himself a chance to complete his system by 
one great book. Before he can do much upon this, old 
age takes away first his noble powers of mind, and then 
his life. This life itself had been as beautiful in its sim¬ 
ple humanity as it had been rigid in its routine. Kant 
was above all a good man, strictly honorable, unalterably 
loyal to his tasks, pleasant and even charming to his few 
near friends, and in his fashion very deeply pious. As 
for the form of his piety, you must know what that was 
before you can be prepared for his reflective doctrines. 

Some people, including, for instance, Heine himself, 
have imagined that there were, in Kant’s religious life, 
two or even three distinct periods, — an early period, say, 
of faith; then a revolutionary and destructive period, 
when, in a sort of secret but none the less Titanic rebel- 


KANT. 


Ill 


liousness, this terrible professor revolted against theology, 
and wrote books that make an end once for all of every 
positive religious belief; then, finally, a third period of 
cowardly, or at all events of weakly timid, withdrawal from 
conflict, when Kant, the old man, fearing the government, 
and perhaps taking compassion upon common folk, recon¬ 
structed, in an inconsistent fashion, the beliefs that his 
“Critique of Pure Reason ” had shattered, and so taught 
God, freedom, and immortality, solely for the sake of his 
own peace. Upon what facts this disgraceful myth about 
Kant’s inconsistency in his old age was founded, I will 
not pause to explain here. You will soon see in what 
sense his great “Critique” was destructive. You will 
also soon see in what sense his later writings were con¬ 
structive as to religious faith. I mention, however, the 
often-repeated tale just to* warn you that it is a myth, 
and that Kant’s attitude towards the affairs of the reli¬ 
gious consciousness changed very little at any time, and 
not at all after once the critical doctrine was in his hands. 

But as to the real form of his piety, it was never akin 
to Spinoza’s mysticism ; it belonged rather to that other, 
to that active form of the religious consciousness, of 
which I spoke, by way of contrast, when I was describ¬ 
ing Spinoza to you. And yet there was something so 
simple and direct about Kant’s attitude towards divine 
things that when he talks of God to you, you feel in as 
direct a relation with one important fact of the eternal 
world as, in Spinoza’s case, you felt in relation to another 
fact. Spinoza says to you : Look upon the seeming chaos 
of nature. For sense it is a disheartening whirlwind of 
vain and fragmentary facts ; yet for reason an infinite 
law dwells in it. This law is supreme, all-compelling. 
It is the law of the divine mind, which reveals one attri¬ 
bute of God’s substance, and of which your mind is a 
part. In the presence of this infinite majesty are you 
every moment. Enter consciously into it, and dwell there, 


112 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


and to you, as wise man, God’s infinite perfection will be 
present as a religious consolation, and you will be unalter¬ 
ably at peace. Of such mystical comfort Kant knows 
nothing. He hates mysticism with a shrewd and sternly 
analytical keenness of critical ill-will, suggestive, in his 
case, of the attitude of the very deliberate and economical 
old bachelor, who dreads nothing more than falling in 
love, or than wasting his hoarded energies upon any 
similar vain and expensive sentimentalities. Mysticism 
and what he would call lovers’ Narrheit are, in Kant’s 
simple and honest mind, closely associated and mercilessly 
scorned. They are both called by him by his favorite 
term of reproach. They are Schwarmerei , vain and 
vague enthusiasm, mere fancy, by gazing fed. Kant, 
this genial and bloodless old hero of contemplation, wast¬ 
ing away in his cheerful asceticism, reverences, as every¬ 
body knows, duty and the stars, but has no time for ro¬ 
mance. The God whom he worships is indeed stern and 
majestic, cares not even to have you demonstrate his ex¬ 
istence, and eludes the cleverness of your theoretic reason 
as loftily as he rejects the loverlike importunities of your 
weak and sentimental moments. He reveals himself, 
indeed, but to your conscience. 

Conscience, for the first, shows you the moral law, — 
shows it as something overwhelmingly rational, absolute, 
universal, indifferent to your private wishes, independent 
of your present happiness, sublime as the heavens are, 
but as directly known to you as is the very existence of 
your will and of your reason. Conscience shows you this 
absolute law, and says sternly, unwaveringly, uncompro¬ 
misingly, “ Do thy duty.” And because conscience shows 
you this, it demands of you that you labor henceforth and 
forever as if you were an instrument, a minister, of a 
divine law that moves in all things. It orders you, then, 
to live as if God were present here all about you in this 
world of sense. He is not to be seen here, indeed, with 


KANT. 


113 


the eye of sense. In vain, for the critical Kant of the 
days after 1780, does even weak theoretic reason try to 
prove to our poor wits that he is here. Sense and specu¬ 
lation alike fail you. But none the less must you act as 
if God ivere your constant and visible companion, as if 
the moral law, which you must regard as his only direct 
revelation, were spoken in your ear by him as by your 
next friend at this moment. And to know that thus you 
ought to act, that thus you ought to live, to wit, as if the 
unsearchable God whom the heavens cannot contain were 
as familiar to you as your daily walk, as visible to you as 
the town-clock, — to know this is to do what Kant calls 
postulating God’s existence. It isn’t sentimental faith 
that you have in God. You don’t believe in him because 
you long to, or because life would be blank if you did n’t, 
or because you fear the charge of atheism. You believe 
in God in one sense and for one reason only, — because a 
man sure of his duty is sure that the right ought to win, 
that in the sense-world it does n’t win, and that in the 
universe it can win only if God is at the helm, — God 
as the absolute and all-powerful well-wisher of the whole 
visible and invisible world-order. This notion of God’s 
existence, a mere hypothesis to your theoretic speculation, 
is for your active consciousness just in such sense a cer¬ 
tainty as you propose to behave as if it were one. 

For the rest, Kant, in his later years, has no hope of 
even illustrating anything about God’s providence by 
appealing, as so many do, to our experience of justice in 
this world, or by any other theoretical means. Kant 
is no optimist, just as he is no sentimentalist, about the 
world of experience. The divine justice does n’t very ob¬ 
viously show itself here below. Kant sees much evil all 
about him ; condemns, in one passage, the people who find 
our present life happy; declares that not one of us would 
willingly lead his own life over again, if he had the free 
choice and were not bound by some sort of duty to do 



114 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


so; in short, speaks almost cynically of those earthly joys 
whereof, with all his cheeriness and his open-heartedness, 
he tasted so little. The few good things of life are such 
things as healthy friendships and successful toils, the 
sober routine of business, of conversation, and of think¬ 
ing. And yet even these are all of them only relatively 
good. The only absolutely good thing in our world is a 
good will, in a being who does his duty. Thus, then, our 
sense-world, if coldly cheerful for the brave and resolute, 
is still no place of rewards; nor does God’s benevolence 
manifest itself except to the moral consciousness. But 
there , indeed, in our conscience, despite all the mystery, 
we know the mind of God. This is what he wants of us, 
namely, our duty. And that he wants this, and will see 
to the absolute success of the right, this is the whole con¬ 
tent of our moral faith. 

Such was Kant’s piety. It has been much misunder¬ 
stood. Especially are people at fault in fancying it a late 
thing in Kant’s life, a product of his old age. He ex¬ 
presses substantially the same thoughts as early as 1766, 
when he is still hoping for theoretical proofs of God’s 
existence. Such proofs, he says, whether we ever get 
them or no, we do not need. The moral consciousness 
reveals God in its own way. Early, then, Kant had 
reached his main assurance. Very late in his career he 
declares, in one passage, that this assurance is no matter 
of subtle philosophy at all. “ The progress of metaphy¬ 
sics in theology is,” he observes, “ the easiest ” [and there¬ 
fore the least] “ of all ” her achievements, and, “ although 
concerned with the remote above sense, is not itself at all 
recondite, but is as clear to common sense as to the phi¬ 
losophers, so much so, in fact, that the thinkers have here 
to find their way by the very light of common sense, lest 
they be lost in the mazes of the recondite.” 

Notice here, if you will, at once the novel aspect of 
Kant’s insight, and at the same time the simplicity and 


KANT. 


115 


familiarity of tlie tiling. Novel is his insight into the 
relations of religion and of reason, — novel, namely, just in 
so far as it is a philosophical insight. The seventeenth 
century had regarded God as first of all an object of 
theory, as the demonstrable source and principle of the 
visible world, and so as a being whose existence we had to 
accept, as it were, submissively, helplessly, because of the 
dogmas of reason. To this dogmatic faith in reason, 
skepticism had later opposed its cruel objections. And 
now comes Kant, whom a long experience of problems 
makes skeptical above all men, cautious, critical, re¬ 
signed to doubts, a hater of mystical faith, a destroyer of 
dogmas; and yet he gives us back our faith, not as a 
dogma, but as an active postulate, as a free spiritual con¬ 
struction, as a determination to live in the presence of the 
unseen and eternal. ~ "New are some of his philosophic 
doubts; new in an uncommon sense will be his fashions 
of theorizing in philosophy; old is his appeal to that 
courage and that loyalty upon which our very civilization 
is founded. For, I insist, this notion of Kant’s about the 
spiritual world, this appeal, not to sentiment, but to con¬ 
science as the warrant of faith, is it not indeed the very 
soul of all instinctive civilization? Consider this same 
fashion of looking not only at the problems about God, but 
at the affairs of worldly experience. Consider the attitude 
of a soldier going into battle against a foe whom he knows 
to be nearly his match in force and arms. He possesses, 
if he is a brave man, some sort of confidence that he will 
win. Well, it is much like Kant’s faith in God. In what 
is this confidence founded ? In experience ? No, this bat¬ 
tle has n’t yet been fought, so that experience is not his 
guide as to this fight, and, as to the past, any old soldier 
is likely to know from experience a good deal about 
defeat, as well as about victory, perhaps even more of lost 
than of won battles. Does he know, then, that he will 
win by any rational intuition? Is it an innate idea in 






116 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


him that he is going to win ? No; to say so would be 
mere trifling. Neither intuition nor experience assures 
him of victory. No merely sentimental faith is this his 
assurance; no datum is it of sense. His belief that he 
will win is identical with his active, manly resolve that 
he is minded to win, that his teeth are set to win, that 
this sword is sharpened, that this bayonet has been 
pointed, that this bullet will soon be winged, with the 
determination of victory. Each army knows that, other 
things equal, the force which is thus most minded to win 
is the force destined to conquer, that here is a case where 
faith can create its own object, that the unseen victory 
will be fashioned precisely by and for the side which most 
fully takes hold of that unseen, and which actively creates 
what it believes in. Well, then, there is in active life 
this way of vindicating your faith. It is by creating the 
very idea of the world wherein your faith is to come true. 
You all know, furthermore, to take an example from 
everyday life, how it is largely our own choice whether 
our lives, in certain aspects of them, say in their cares 
and responsibilities, their routine and their disappoint¬ 
ments, are tolerable or not. Evil besets us, pain op- 
j^resses us, chagrin or calamity overwhelms us. We cry 
out bitterly, “ Prove to me that such a life is good. Ex¬ 
perience does n’t show it to be good. And as for faith, 
as for intuitive trust that it is good, this I have lost. My 
noble sentiments fade out; my natural love of life for¬ 
sakes me. Is it all tolerable ? Prove that to me.” The 
answer of the active temperament, the answer which 
seems so stern to us in our moments of weakness and 
cowardice, so inspiring to us in our moments of spiritual 
dignity and courage, is the answer: “ Your world is toler- 
able, yes, is even glorious, if, and only if, you actively make 
it so. Its spirituality is your own creation, or else is 
nothing. Awake, arise, be willing, endure, struggle, defy 
evil, cleave to good, strive, be strenuous, be devoted, throw 


KANT. 


117 


into the face of evil and depression your brave cry of ha¬ 
tred and of resistance, and then this dark universe of des¬ 
tiny will glow with a divine light. Then you will com¬ 
mune with the eternal. For you have no relations with 
the eternal world save such as you make for yourself.” 
My illustrations are here inadequate to the full expression 
of Kant’s notion of the postulate, but that is because of 
the difference of the objects treated. 

In describing thus the answer of spiritual courage to 
our despair, I am, as you see, once more stating a mood, 
an attitude of life. You see all along the contrast 
between this way of viewing the deepest truths and the 
way which Spinoza suggested to us. I am not here con¬ 
cerned with the final rights of the controversy. I am 
only trying to introduce you to Kant’s notion of our rela¬ 
tion to spiritual truth; and Kant’s piety, Kant’s attitude 
towards religious problems, Kant’s notion of faith in God, 
is in essence this heroic notion. He conceives here, as 
later in the theoretical part of his philosophy, that truth, 
so far as we mortals can know it, is neither from innate 
ideas, nor from our experience. It comes to us because 
we make it. This determination of ours it is that seizes 
hold upon God, then, just as the courage of the manly soul 
makes life good, introduces into life something that is 
there only for the activity of the hero, finds God because 
the soul has wrestled for his blessing, and then has found 
after all that the wrestling is the blessing. God is with 
us only because we choose to serve our ideal of him as if 
he were present to our senses. His kingdom exists 
because we are resolved that, so far as in us lies, it shall 
come. In this sign we conquer. This is the victory that 
overcometh the world, not our intuition, not our sentimen¬ 
tal faith, but our live, our moral, our creative faith. 

You see thus more fully how highly common-sense is 
this core of Kant’s doctrine. This is, if you will, the wis¬ 
dom of modern practical men of high mind everywhere. 


118 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


“ I don’t know much about God liimself, or about the 
world,” says such an one, “ but I can know something of 
my own nature, and I propose to behave as if God were 
now looking at me.” Well, Kant took this doctrine of 
what one might call the higher common sense, and, as we 
shall also see in his theoretical philosophy, he applied 
it to everything from geometry to theology. So applied 
the thing becomes vastly involved, prodigiously technical, 
the work of a life-time. But the hearty and humane 
Kant stirred his age so profoundly because in his quiet 
way he carried, deep in his pious soul, a doctrine of 
life so simple, so stern, so heroic, and yet so universally 
manly and sensible, that all modern men were touched by 
it. This is, indeed, the wonder of Kant, that, born and 
reared in the midst of pedantry, a mere man of books, a 
system-maker, a metaphysician, he should still express the 
very heart of the high-minded man of the world. “ I am 
very ignorant of the nature of things,” — so far Kant and 
the man of the world are together; “ but I do know my 
duty, and I am determined to live as under God’s eye,” — 
this is the other, the practically positive side of Kant’s 
doctrine, and, as you see, once more the high-minded man 
is with Kant. This doctrine, however, means, of course, 
in the reflective thinker, far more in one sense than it 
means in the man of the world. It leads him to an 
exhaustive research into the foundations of human reason, 
it means decades of philosophical experience, of wander¬ 
ing from hypothesis to hypothesis, of criticism, of resigna¬ 
tion to the truth, combined with fearless constructive 
research. And that, again, is why it finally takes in 
Kant’s case so elaborate a form. 

To this form itself we now proceed. If Kant’s reli¬ 
gious consciousness underwent little change with years, his 
theoretical opinions were subjected between 1755, when 
he entered upon his docentship at the university, and 
1781, when he published his “Critique of Pure Reason,” 


KANT. 


119 


to a course of discipline such as few men have ever borne 
and lived. In matters of theory, Kant was, after all, 
by nature a very conservative person. Some men are 
born rebels, and some men have the reformer’s office 
thrust upon them. Kant was of the lattpr class. He was 
as rigidly economical of his faiths as he was of all his other 
possessions. He never gave up an idea until his self-crit¬ 
icism forced him to do so. Skeptical, I have called him, 
above all men ; but his skepticism meant at the start mere 
considerateness, mere thoroughness and honesty of reflec¬ 
tion. He had no wish to make his reflections negative. 
If fortune forced negative results upon him, he could not 
help that. 1 Against change he, to be sure, never blindly 
struggled, just as he never hastened towards the revolu¬ 
tion that he was destined to bring to pass. Shall I weary 
you too much if I sketch to you a little of Kant’s reflec¬ 
tive fortunes? 

He began, in his youth, where the traditional university 
philosophy of his time had placed him, with the traditions 
of the philosophy of the seventeenth century in his mind. 
The world where he found himself was the world that 
reason comprehends, where all is to be clear, distinct, log¬ 
ical, formal. We know a real world of law, where God 
reigns, and where everything is rational. The philoso¬ 
pher is to make plain the logic of things. But alas for 
the fixity of this formalism ! Kant is unfortunately more 
than a mere philosopher. He loves to study science and 
man. And in the world of science there are so many sur¬ 
prising things, so many strange facts, that logic can’t con¬ 
struct, — yes, there are more things in heaven and earth 
than are dreamt of in your philosophy . And not mere 

1 See the valuable note, No. 3, in Benno Erdmann’s Reflexionen 
Kant’s, vol. ii. p. 4, where Kant states very finely his relations to 
skepticism and to dogmatism. My own immediately following para¬ 
graph is an effort to summarize the much discussed and rather ob« 
scure period from 1755 to 1766. 


120 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


magic, not only superstition shows you such things, as 
they were shown to Hamlet. It is just science that proves 
how, amidst all the longings of our reason for the clear 
and distinct truth of nature, we are continually in the 
presence of opaque and ultimate facts, — yes, even of prin¬ 
ciples that our pure reason could n’t have predicted — 
such principles, for instance, as the law of gravitation. 
And as for man, how mysterious and often how illogical 
is his wayward inner nature. Kant meditates upon these 
things. Can logic, after all, give you a world ? As Kant 
thus examines the littleness of our powers, he grows, as it 
were, an ascetic in the enjoyment of his logic. He is n’t 
so sure that you can spin the world out of reason. He 
doubts whether the secret of things can ever be made 
open to even the highest finite intelligence. Perhaps the 
lesson of philosophy will prove to be resignation. At all 
events the lesson of every failure of reflective thought is 
sure to be caution. 

So far Kant went in the first ten years of his univer¬ 
sity life as docent. The results of his work were poor. 
They almost discouraged him. Often he imagined him¬ 
self on the very verge of discovering a great and new 
method of thinking. As often he seemed to be disap¬ 
pointed. “I have the fortune,” he says, in 1766, “to be 
a lover of Metaphysics ; but my mistress has shown me 
few favors so far.” In those days, and later, Kant as 
a student had odd fashions of work. He jotted down 
numberless notes, chaotic-seeming dead leaves of fallen 
reflection that lay, as it were, forgotten amidst the dark 
forest of his secret thought. He cared little for such 
notes; he let the dead leaves moulder into the soil, if we 
may say so, to fertilize it for the coming springtime; and 
now, indeed, it was the autumn of his silent meditations. 
Since his death, Kant’s lovers have busily hunted for such 
of the autumn leaves as did not moulder, and to-day there 
are Kant archives in the Konigsberg library, and else- 


KANT. 


121 

where, where such things are kept and prized. Singular 
bits of paper they are, these notes! The poor and 
thrifty Kant wasted nothing. Here, say, is an old invita¬ 
tion to dinner, or to a visit at Herr So and So’s country- 
house. Kant has refolded the letter, and has written, not 
only on its back, but perchance all about and through its 
text, such memoranda as that Mr. Charisius Stockheim has 
paid his fees for the course this term, and that in a capil¬ 
lary tube of such a diameter water rises so high. He 
adds, perhaps, some quoted Latin verses, the title of a 
book or two, and then a paragraph of metaphysics. Real¬ 
ity can only be given to us through sensation, but per¬ 
ception adds thereto the construction of the idea of quan¬ 
tity ; then there are, moreover, just three functions of 
apperception ; but the mind itself gives us the only idea of 
what synthesis means. Thereupon, perhaps Kant jots 
down a triangle or two, makes a computation, and lets his 
note-making degenerate into illegible marks. What one 
wonders at is the vast numbers of such scraps. Kant 
never let a thought go by. The margins and interleav¬ 
ings of his books, especially of his lecture text-books, were 
also full of such things. So unwearied was Kant. The 
years fly on and he notes and notes — so fruitlessly, one 
would think! He is so faithful to his thoughts, and yet 
so merciless, — so faithful, for they all go down; so merci¬ 
less, for he takes no pain to give them permanent form 
or fair shape and organization. Later jottings seem to 
have forgotten the earlier ones. The children of his re¬ 
flection are never spared. He loves them not; he flies 
from them to new thoughts. On and on his life of medita¬ 
tion grows, so slowly, so patiently, once more just like the 
forest. What is the meaning, what will be the outcome 
of this endless bearing and casting down of thoughts ? 1 

Yet there is indeed method in it all. About 1768, Kant 

1 The illustrations of Kant’s notes above are brought together 
from several places in fteicke’s Lose Blatter aus Kant’s Nachlass. 


122 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

shows traces of a wholly new fashion of thinking. The 
world undergoes a change for him, whose significance, at 
first, he himself can hardly estimate. He observes, in a 
fresh fashion, and with a novel accent, how all truth about 
the physical world is dependent upon the truth concern¬ 
ing time and space. I reword some of his thoughts about 
space in my own way. Whatever matter there were in 
the outer world, there would in any case have to be space 
to put the matter in, and so the laws of matter have to 
conform to the laws of space. Nature must perforce obey 
geometry; else could she get no room for her things, and 
even so with time. The laws of space come first in order. 
The laws of physics come, as it were, logically later, and 
must be congruent with the space laws. But space, on 
the other hand, is not obliged to conform to the laws of 
matter. Just as the principle that what is done can’t be 
undone, even so the principle that a straight line is the 
shortest distance between two points, or that you can’t 
put the left glove on the right hand, illustrates formal 
laws of the world, prior in nature to the laws of matter. 
Moving bodies may fly as they will in accordance with 
laws of physics. They cannot fly in accordance with any 
possible law so as to move through the shortest distances 
and yet not fly in straight lines. The matter of your 
hands may have what laws or nature it will; nothing 
could permit the left glove to go on to the right hand but 
a change in the necessary laws of geometry. Geometrical 
laws, then, like the laws of time, go together to make 
nature possible. Know what space and time are, and you 
will know something about the truths that condition the 
world’s very existence. 1 

Well, then, what are space and time? About 1769, it 

1 The importance here given to the well-known essay of 1768 is 
in agreement so far with Riehl’s view (Der Philosophische Kriticismus f 
vol. i. p. 262). See also Caird, op. cit. vol. i. p. 164. From this 
point on, I follow partly the views of Benuo Erdmann. 


KANT. 


123 


occurred to Kant to observe that both space and time are, 
when regarded as real things, thoroughly and hopelessly 
paradoxical, self-contradictory in their nature. Kant was 
fond in those days 1 of setting over against one another 
opposing assertions about fundamental truths, and giving 
a fair chance to both sides in the controversy. He elab¬ 
orated this old method of research very carefully and in 
an original fashion, and in consequence he called it by 
special names of his own choosing. He used it to bring 
out the paradoxical character that after all lies so deeply 
imbedded in the very heart of all human thinking. Ap¬ 
plying this fashion of analysis to space and time, Kant 
found that, if you once regard them as realities, as facts 
existent outside your own mind, you can make diametri¬ 
cally opposed assertions about them, and yet prove both 
of a pair of such assertions to be true. The result so far 
is puzzling; but look at it an instant. Of space you can 
say that it is infinitely divisible, that is, that cut it up as 
small as you like, the parts will still have size, and so can 
be cut again, so that you could never reach the end of your 
cutting. This you can say, and you can prove it too, if\ 
namely, space is a real thing that stays there to be cut, 
apart from your ideas of it. Equally certain it is, how¬ 
ever, in case space is real, and is made up of parts, that 
then, if you let it in conception crumble away like a heap 
of sand, to find what in the last analysis it is made of, 
there must be found somewhere ultimate parts, real space- 
atoms, which you could reach by this process of ideal 
analysis, and which you could n’t divide. For if there is 
a heap of manifold parts, like a heap of sand, and you 
conceive it to fall into bits for the sake of analysis, then 
surely where there are many units there must be units. 
Therefore, if space is a reality, you can prove, thinks 
Kant, that it is infinitely divisible and that it is n’t infi- 

1 See the introduction to Benno Erdmann’s Reflexionen KanVs zut 
Kritischen Philosophies vol. ii. p. xxxv. 


124 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


nitely divisible. That seems absurd, but what does such 
an absurd result prove ? It proves, so Kant holds, that 
space is n’t real at all, but just an idea of yours, a uni¬ 
versal but inner condition of your consciousness of outer 
objects. This result is revolutionary for him. Space and 
time, he had already said, are the conditions prior of all 
physical nature. And now space and time can be thus 
proved to be unreal outside of our minds. What follows ? 
The whole of this seeming outer nature is no outer fact at 
all. It is a mere phenomenon in us. That doctrine is 
the first half of Kant’s critical philosophy. 


IY. 

In 1770, he stated this theory of the subjectivity of 
time and space, as he called his notion, in a dissertation 
that he wrote on his assumption of a professor’s chair at 
Konigsberg. In this dissertation he gives yet another 
proof of his new doctrine. Space and time can’t be real, 
Kant now says, for we know too much about them, know 
them, not by bare observation, but with a mathematical 
completeness such as we could n’t possess with regard to 
outer facts, know more than we could have found out if 
they existed really beyond ourselves. We know, for in¬ 
stance, of time and space as they are for our minds, that 
they are infinite wholes, prior to any of their own parts as 
well as to the things that exist in them. Furthermore, as 
you can easily see, space and time don’t seem to us to be 
properties of things, as color and taste are ; nor yet are 
they separate things of nature. Father are they just con¬ 
ditions of our sense-knowledge of things. So, then, they 
can’t be real at all, except as facts of our consciousness. 
Kant therefore calls space and time forms of perception, 
or sense-forms. Our world seems to be in space and time 
because it is our own nature to view it as spatial and tem¬ 
poral. Space and time appear to us to belong outside 
us, merely because they are conditions in us of our seeing 


KANT. 


125 


and feeling things, forms of our sense. It is with them 
as with colored spectacles. If one always wore green 
goggles, all his world would seem green to him. Even 
so, because we always perceive under these forms of 
sense, space and time, which are just our forms of per¬ 
ceiving things, cannot but seem real to us. In fact they 
are n’t revelations of truth outside us at all. They are 
our own fashions of receiving the things that we perceive. 
It was largely in consequence of this doctrine, which I 
state now, after all, in its outcome, rather than in its full 
proof, that Kant later came to declare that the things 
themselves outside of us, which arouse our sensations, the 
things as they are in themselves, since they can’t be spa¬ 
tial, nor temporal, are in fact utterly unknowable. No¬ 
body can prove the least thing about what the real world 
is. We know first of all only our own sense impressions, 
which are whatever they happen to be. We know also 
that there are things beyond us which we view through 
our sense-forms. But what those things are, how should 
we ever find out ? We are cut off from them by the illu¬ 
sions of sense. We know our seeming world in space and 
in time. It has law and order in it, such law and order 
as science finds there. Astronomy is true for the seeming 
world, although in the absolute world there is no space, 
and although what the stars and the atoms are is unknow¬ 
able. But thus, you see, we have found a limit to science. 
It can never know things in themselves. And so Kant’s 
critical doctrine ultimately came to be one of the neces¬ 
sary limits of all theoretical thought. 

That, at least, was the idea that Kant in his later 
works reached. In 1770, he still hoped to find by some 
device of logic a way to a knowledge of things in them¬ 
selves beyond our private and human sense-forms of space 
and time. But from this hopeful “ dogmatic slumber ” 
(as he once calls it) Hume’s skepticism finally awoke him 
in the years immediately following 1772. 1 

1 Of several hypotheses current in the literature of the topic I 


126 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


V. 

Hume it was who gave the final touch to Kant’s re¬ 
flection by his stern assertion that in the world of expe¬ 
rience facts are only conjoined, and never connected. Im¬ 
pressions we know, says Hume, and ideas we know ; but 
who ever yet saw causation, or experienced necessity? 
In the world of sense there are facts, but there are no 
links. You see things happen ; you can’t see why they 
must happen. This criticism of Hume’s deeply affected 
Kant. Kant had already almost given up finding out the 
nature of outer things by logic. He was ready very soon 
to give it up altogether. He was content with the narrow 
limits of our sense-forms ; if only the seeming space-and- 
time-world, the seeming world which science looks upon 
and examines, could be shown to have order in it. The 
astronomer does n’t care whether space and time are sense- 
forms, or whether he knows or not the stars as they are in 
themselves. What he wants to be sure of is that nature, 
seeming or real, in show-space or in itself, has discover¬ 
able law and order in it, uniformity, causal fixity, genuine 
reasonableness, about it. Well, Kant wanted to make 
out this thing, too. He thought it over in silence for some 
years. The result of his reflection was expressed in the 
great “ Critique.” And that new result, the second and 
greater half of his doctrine, was something like the follow¬ 
ing:— 

In so far as the world is seen by us in our sense-forms 
of space and time, it is bound to appear to us as conform¬ 
able to their laws. Nature, then, is forced to obey geome¬ 
try, because nature, after all, is just a show-nature, our 

choose the most probable. Here as before I largely follow Benno 
Erdmann. The awakening influence of Hume was formerly referred 
to the years from 1762 to 1766. Professor Paulsen of Berlin first 
called in question this view, and suggested 1769 as a more likely 
date. 


KANT. 


127 


own experience, and so conformable to our own funda¬ 
mentally geometrical ways of viewing it. Well, even so, 
when we think of natural events, there are certain con¬ 
ditions governing our thinking process. And to these 
conditions the products of our thought, the objects of our 
experience, must needs conform. For the objects of 
our experience aren’t the things in themselves, but are 
just our thoughts. If our thought, as a process of com¬ 
prehending our experience, is obliged to treat the facts 
before it as conforming to rational laws, in order to think 
of them at all, well, then, the facts of experience, being 
once for all facts of inner life, will have to conform to 
law, and that will be the end of it. To be sure, if we 
knew by sight the things as they are in themselves, we 
should indeed have to conform wholly to their ways ; and, 
as Hume’s criticism implied, unless we then saw causa¬ 
tion and necessary connection amongst the matters of 
fact, we could n’t be sure of such connections at all. But, 
you see, we don’t know by sight any things in themselves. 
We see only the show-world in the sense-forms. Its mat¬ 
ters of fact are then just our own matters of fact. In 
knowing nature we are but learning to know ourselves. 
If it is the fundamental fashion of our thinking to become 
conscious of objects as orderly, then orderly they will be 
for us. Then our world will have in it not only conjunc¬ 
tion, but connection of facts. Our understanding will 
think the linkages into our show-world. The dutifully 
bound seeming universe of our experience will obey the 
law of the inner life, whose thought it is. This obedience 
will control all things, however remote, in these phantom- 
forms of space and time, — yes, as it were, will preserve 
the stars from wrong, and the most ancient heavens 
through this be fresh and strong. Is such a conception a 
paradox ? Then look at it once more. 1 

1 The immediately following free paraphrase of one central 
thought of the “ deduction ” is more fully discussed in Supplement 


128 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


A sane man differs from a man with a maniacal flight 
of ideas, or from a patient in delirium, most in this, that 
the sane man, at every moment, looks, as it were, out of 
this moment to his larger self, and links this moment with 
the past and future, while the other’s soul, as Kant would 
say (although he does not use this, my own illustration), 
is filled with a Gewuhl von Erscheinungen , with a mass 
of flighty seemings. The sane man continually collects 
himself \ as we ordinarily express it, binds this to that, 
and thereby , — and this is Kant’s central thought, — 
thereby sees links in his seeming outer world just be¬ 
cause he does collect himself, just because it is of the 
essence of his sanity to think connections there yonder in 
his show-world. Kant has a technical name for what I 
have just named sanity. He himself does not use the 
latter word; he calls this process and condition of all 
rational consciousness Transcendental Unity of appercep* 
tion. It depends upon and involves self-recognition ; but 
self-recognition, if you look at it carefully, is indeed seen 
to include the binding of fact to fact in your experience. 
If I be I, as I think I be, says the little old woman of 
the song, then will my little dog know me. The poor 
woman is striving, you remember, to recover the unity of 
her apperception, of which a sad and recent incident has 
deprived her. She seeks it, and how? By striving to 
link fact to fact in her sleepy experience. Well, even so, 
Kant holds, that if I be I, as I think I be, then will the 
phenomena of my sense-world in a certain deeper just 
sense know me, that is, recognize the authority of my 
thought-forms, or categories. The little woman, then, had, 
in her way, grasped the idea of that most puzzling part of 
Kant’s “ Critique,” the so-called transcendental deduction 
of the categories. For once more, if I am to be at this 

B. The illustration of the “ Unity of Apperception ” by the idea of 
“ sanity ” is, I think, justified by many aspects of Kant’s phraseology, 
remote as it is from his own wording. 


KANT. 


129 


moment sane, then I must regard myself as much more 
than this momentary self. I must communicate, as it 
were, with my past and my future, which are n’t now here 
at all. And in doing this, causation, and the other ideas 
of connection in nature, are the tools of my understanding. 
They give to my objects a communicable, a typical, a 
universal character. By connecting facts in my mind, I 
connect my mind in itself. This desk before me, to take 
yet another example, this desk, as a fact in my sense form 
of space and time, is the product of my natural sanity, 
which simply makes coherent a mass of feelings, holds 
together in some sort of unity what I see and touch. 
In so far as I am a sensible person I say to myself, “ All 
these feelings of mine just at this point of space must 
somehow belong together. Hereby only can I make an 
object out of them, having a permanent type that I can 
recognize again. This object must also somehow cohere 
with what I have seen before, because I am one self, and 
my experience must somehow hold together. Therefore 
I say that the object has substantiality, that it persists in 
time, that whenever it came into being something pro¬ 
duced it as its cause, and so on.” Thus, you see, I bring 
the table into my world, into the one coherent experience 
which constitutes my larger self. To my larger self, to 
my whole actual and possible'coherent experience, always 
I look up ; to this I make my active appeal. The moment 
is my moment so far only as it conforms to the universal 
and orderly types of my whole self-consciousness. 

In large part, however, this process of constructively 
making my world coherent, is, on its theoretical side 
indeed unconscious, just as the inventions of an artistic 
mind are often unconsciously made. There is in me a 
blind application of my forms of thought, a reasonable 
but not necessarily self-conscious defense of my sanity. 
Kant calls this busy and half-blind application of the 
forms of thought to the facts of sense, whereby we make 


130 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


everything, from pictures in the firelight to the subliinest 
constructions of science, whereby we get our great world 
of tables and people and houses and suns and star-systems 
and atoms and laws of nature, — he calls, I say, this busy 
inner world-building power of our minds the “ constructive 
imagination.” It builds solely on the basis of our expe¬ 
rienced sensations; it produces purely in the forms of 
space and time; it has as theoretical power nothing to 
say of God, nor yet of the moral law; it builds our world 
as a great genius makes a poem, how, he knows not; it is 
involuntary, hidden away in the mind, the servant of our 
understanding, the minister of the forms of thought; but 
it gives us this bright and solid world that is all about us ; 
and, in the way of theoretical knowledge, we have nothing 
better than what it gives us. Without continual support 
from sense, this poetical faculty of ours could do nothing. 
As sensations, unformed, would be a mere flight of ideas, 
unreal and insane, so these notions of the understanding, 
causation, substantiality, and the rest, have no meaning 
except as applied by our constructive imagination to ren¬ 
dering coherent our world of sense. That is just why we 
do not know at all that these forms of thought apply to 
the things in themselves. 

And it is thus that so much the more, when we come to 
those other objects of pure and constructively voluntary 
faith, namely, God and the rest, we have a right to trust 
“ the truths that never can be proved.” For by this theo¬ 
retical doctrine we have shown that nothing but the clear 
and unmistakable demands of the moral law, which re¬ 
quires of us a submission to an eternally significant order, 
could ever by any possibility carry us beyond sense. We 
have no theoretical power whereby we can escape from 
the prison of the inner life, or from the purely phenome. 
nal reality, the show-world, which our constructive imagi¬ 
nation builds up. Theoretically speaking, our show-world 
is only the poem which the inner life makes. Hence only 


KANT. 


131 


our homage to the absolute imperative of our practical 
reason, which categorically demands of us that we act as 
if we were in an eternal world, — only this, and our free 
choice to obey, can put us into relations with the unknown 
beyond sense. The theoretical view of things, this work 
of art of the inner life, is morally insufficient. Hence we 
have to postulate God beyond it. Such, then, in sum, is the 
content of my world. The understanding creates the laws 
of phenomenal nature, creates them, indeed, not without 
the most close and constant reference to the facts of sense, 
creates them, in truth, merely by actively uniting together 
these facts of sense, but still creates the whole organiza¬ 
tion, the coherence, the unity, the sanity, of our world of 
business, of society, and of science. The stars, too, just 
because they are our stars, experienced by us, must be 
orderly, as our understanding is orderly. That you and I 
see the same world depends merely upon the fact that 
we all work upon similar ideas of sense with similar 
powers of understanding. We all have part, as it were, 
in the one ideal self of humanity’s experience. For us all 
alike this world is an inner creation. To state the case 
finally, in a general formula: The unknown things in 
themselves give us sense experiences. These we first per¬ 
ceive in the forms of space and time, because that is our 
way of perceiving. Then, being coherent creatures, we 
order this our world of sense according to the laws of 
causation and the other “ categories ” which are forms 
of thought. Thus we all alike get a world, which, while 
it is in all its sanity and order an inner world, is still for 
each of us apparently an outer world, — a world of fact, 
a world of life. The unity of our personality demands 
the unity of our experience; this demands that our show- 
world of nature should conform to the laws of thought; 
and thus causality, necessity, and all the other categories 
of the understanding are realized in the world through 
our constructive imagination, which working in the ser- 


I 


132 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

vice of the understanding actively puts them into the 
world. 

VI. 

By this marvelously subtle thought Kant at once de¬ 
stroys and builds up. The world of Locke’s bare expe¬ 
rience vanishes. The world of the Cartesian innate ideas 
is nothing any more. Even for Spinoza’s eternal order, 
as an outward fact, Kant’s theory has no place. He de¬ 
votes long sections of the “ Critique ” to an elaborate 
undermining of every form of speculative dogmatism. As 
the freeman hates tyrants, so Kant hates submission to an 
outward and absolute order invented by the pretensions 
of a thought that would transcend our limited powers. 
And yet he does n’t assert all this for the mere sake of 
destructive skepticism. One certainty remains to him 
which is indeed absolute enough. It is that certainty of 
the moral law, which in Kant’s system takes the place 
that the adoration of the eternal order took in Spinoza’s 
doctrine. To the moral law and its consequences, Kant 
devoted three of the most important of his later works. 
You know theoretically only that rigid order of the world 
of show which is indeed enough for empirical science, but 
which gives you no warrant to talk about things as they 
are in themselves. But you do know one practical cer¬ 
tainty which sends you far beyond sense. You know that 
you ought to do right, and doing right for Kant is some¬ 
thing very simple, rigid, and absolute. There is no com¬ 
promise in his case between the moral law and the desires 
of sense. Inclination and duty are no friends for Kant. 
To do right, thinks Kant, is to act at any time as you 
could wish that a whole world full of moral agents should 
act, to act after a fashion worthy to be made a public and 
universal law of life. The moral law admits of no excep¬ 
tions. It is reasonableness in action. Kant loves to 
dwell on its simple and awful sublimity. Universality of 
the method or principle of your conduct is its aim. Abso. 


KANT. 


133 


lute truthfulness, absolute respect for the rights and free¬ 
dom of every one of your fellow-men, utter devotion to 
the cause of high-mindedness, of honesty, of justice, of 
simplicity, of honor, — such is Kant’s ideal, and so far as 
in him lay he was always true to it. It is a stern and 
rigid ideal, very rare in philosophy, and even infrequent 
in the life of the world ; but it is Kant’s ideal. And now 
he further says: In this show-world of your limitation and 
ignorance, you are bound to behave thus reasonably and 
sublimely, and there is necessarily associated with your be¬ 
havior a determination to trust faithfully and absolutely 
that the right, thus acted out, will triumph, and that 
there is a God who will see that it triumphs. You are 
moved so to trust in God, because that is simply the wise 
and honorable thing to do. And this world of yours, as 
one sees, is not a world of absolute insight, but first of 
sane and active unification of your personal experience, 
and then of honorable doing, a world whose highest wis¬ 
dom is the service of the ideal that reason conceives. 

This hasty sketch has now put before you, not Kant’s 
whole doctrine, but something of the fine and manly atti¬ 
tude which, amidst all his subtlety and his skepticism, he 
always maintained. I know not how wearisome this sub¬ 
tlety itself has been to you, even in my utterly fragmen¬ 
tary suggestion of its quality. The professional student 
often forgets how these things used to seem to him when 
he began his work, and wonders now how such long pur¬ 
suit of the inner life, even into the recesses of its dimmest 
and most sacred temples of faith, may appear to those 
who do not spend their lives in such wanderings. Well, 
be that all what it may, my duty is done if I have sug¬ 
gested to you anything of a doctrine which has created 
the philosophy of the present century; and as for the 
present obscurity of the whole to you, remember that all 
the rest of these lectures will be of necessity, in one 
aspect, an exposition of the consequences of this theory 
of Kant, so that we shall know it better hereafter. 


134 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

What, then, is our outcome ? We have reached almost 
the opposite pole of reflection from that which Spinoza’s 
system occupied. Spinoza saw the substance with the eye 
of an undoubting reason. He was sure, dogmatic, abso¬ 
lute in his pretensions ; and being thus too sure of him¬ 
self, he lost himself in contemplating the eternal. We 
have seen how the study of the inner life drew men away 
from this confidence of reason, even as far as the skepti¬ 
cism of Hume. Now we have seen how Kant, in the 
midst of this wilderness of skepticism, built once more 
the fair spiritual world. Strongly contrasted as are these 
two systems, that of Spinoza and that of Kant, both 
stand, I think, for moments, for elements, in the higher 
thought of humanity. Whether any synthesis of the 
two is possible, we have yet to see. Both are for us, 
thus far, experiences of humanity, stages of fortune 
through which man’s spirit passes ; and as for Kant’s 
stage, he shows, as you see, how, amidst the ruins of 
sense and of doubt, the triumphant reason still builds its 
world of law and of ideal truth, builds because it is 
minded to do so, builds by virtue of its natural coherence 
and its moral courage. Kant’s thought, then, is, in one 
aspect, the thought which Tennyson has made so familiar 
to our time : — 

“ 0 living will that shalt endure 

When all that seems shall suffer shock, 

Rise in the spiritual rock, 

Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure, 

“ That we may lift from out of dust 
A voice as unto him that hears, 

A cry above the conquer’d years 
To one that with us works, and trust, 

“ With faith that comes of self-control, 

The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved, 

And all we flow from, soul in soul.” 


LECTURE V. 


FICHTE. 

Now that we have reached and passed for the first time 
in our study the thinker upon whom, more than upon 
any other centre, modern thought turns, as upon a fulcrum, 
I am tempted to pause, at the beginning of this lecture, 
until I have suggested still more of what Kant means to 
modern thought. It is not, I suppose, merely historical 
sketches of the philosophers that you desire from me. 
You want to get from these philosophers such help as this 
brief study can suggest towards a comprehension of the 
spiritual problems of our own day. So, after suggesting 
at the last lecture what manner of man the historical 
Kant was, and what was the essence of his doctrine, I 
shall now try to draw afresh the moral from this part of 
our story. 

i. 

The movement from Spinoza to Kant has taught us a 
lesson which human thought everywhere has to learn, 
namely, that deeper truth is too valuable to be won by 
any short and easy process, and that spiritual history has 
everywhere a decidedly tragic element. We begin with 
our world simply, in a childlike faith that nature and God 
are ours by right of our birth. Our first lesson is that 
they are both of them at all events far deeper realities 
than we had supposed. Nature for Spinoza, as for all 
other great thinkers, is n’t the nature that you see with 
your eyes. It is the nature that you think with your rea¬ 
son ; and to think it with your reason you have to go be¬ 
hind sense to the law, to the substance of things. Even 


136 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


so, in your relations with God, you have, according to 
Spinoza, to forsake the naive and joyous trust in life 
through which you first see him. “ When,” says Spinoza, 
“ I had learned that all the surroundings of life are vain 
and futile,” — so his pilgrimage began. A long training, 
he tells us, was needed ere he became at home in those 
solitudes where he ultimately found God. It was, he de¬ 
clares, through a contempt for all the things which the 
multitude seek that he came to learn the true good, beyond 
all that they seek, namely, the peace which the world can 
neither give nor take away. Encouraging to us about 
Spinoza was, then, that his tale ended joyously, in a wis¬ 
dom whereby he was exalted beyond all the phantom 
world of sense; but grave and stern about him was his 
teaching that the way to this wisdom is so toilsome ; “ for 
all things excellent,” he says, “ are as difficult as they are 
rare.” 

This lesson, that the true joy of the spirit is indeed 
res severa , a stern thing, is still further deepened in our 
minds by the struggle of thought in the eighteenth cen¬ 
tury. It was not the mere waywardness of the eighteenth- 
century thinkers that forbade them to accept as final the 
guidance of even the intuitive reason to which Spinoza 
and his fellows had all trusted so implicitly. It was a 
necessary progress in reflection that drove these men to 
their scrutiny of the inner life, a scrutiny whose tragedy 
we found exemplified by Hume’s lightly and cheerfully 
spoken, but weighty and gloomy words, “ sophistry and 
illusion.” But this, at all events, still seems to me sure : 
Whoever has not wandered that Yia Dolorosa of the 
eighteenth century’s doubt of both reason and sense 
alike, will never be able to knock at the door at the end 
of that way, the door which Kant first of all men found 
opened to him. It has opened before us now in the last 
discussion. We have entered, and what do we find? We 
find, not what, in the childlike simplicity of our first love 


FICHTE. 


137 


of truth, we should have desired, a God revealed direct to 
sense, or a divine order manifest even to our intuitive 
reason ; but something very different. We read, when we 
enter the new door, as it were a mysterious writing, pre¬ 
pared by unseen and unknown hands, a letter, left for our 
guidance by a remote and even unknowable guide. The 
letter contains only the moral law, and the word, “ Serve 
the unseen God as if he were present with you.” That is 
in the first place all. Upon this and this only, according 
to Kant, our faith must build. For this, as the inner 
voice now tells us, is the call that, with all our better na¬ 
ture, we are henceforth minded to obey. Our will is the 
solution. “Work out the divine,” says the new philoso¬ 
phy. “ Build anew the lost spiritual world, which skep¬ 
ticism shattered; ” such is the command of Kant’s prac¬ 
tical reason. All this is unquestionably a hard doctrine. 
It is not what we sought. We sought peace, and the phi¬ 
losopher has brought us not peace, but a sword. We 
sought the joy of God’s presence, and Kant has sent us 
to work out a divine mission in a wilderness far remote 
from all absolute insight. And yet, stern as this doctrine 
is, you must feel its courage and its wisdom. After all, 
here is at least a part of the truth. Life is not an easy 
thing ; the spiritual life is the hardest of all lives ; and of 
all spiritual gifts, next perhaps to charity itself, insight is 
surely the most difficult to win. As long as these things 
are so, Kant’s doctrine will retain its profound ethical and 
religious significance. But, you will ask, is this, then, wis¬ 
dom’s last word, “ der Weisheit letzter Schluss f ” Well, 
for my part I do not think so. I warn you indeed that 
in philosophy, if you will go beyond Kant, you must 
meet new dangers, and must attempt new and venture¬ 
some wandering. But for my part I love to wander, far 
and long, and I hold that there are indeed heights yet to 
climb that cleave the heavens far above and beyond this 
dwelling-place of Kant. If you will go with me, we will try 


138 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

also these new adventures; but meanwhile I want to point 
out to you, ere we bid farewell to our greatest modern 
thinker, how there are more senses than one in which 
henceforth, wherever our feet carry us, his wisdom will go 
with us and direct us. After all, the spiritual world that 
Kant bade us build is the modern world; and Kant is the 
true hero of all modern thought. If in one sense it is 
only by transcending him and even by forgetting some of 
his limitations that we are to triumph, he is none the less 
forever our guide. Kant is, if you like, the homely and 
somewhat incongruous figure, a sort of John Brown of our 
century of speculative warfare. Derided as a rebel and an 
enemy of the faith by many of his own time, he dies be¬ 
fore the modern conflict is fairly begun, but his soul goes 
marching on through the whole of it. Or to take another 
more suggestive, but similarly inadequate comparison, he 
resembles the hero of the Heroic Symphony, who is dead 
and buried in the second movement, but who is none the 
less spiritually and obviously present in the romantic and 
fairy-like outburst of new life in the scherzo, and the joy¬ 
ous apotheosis of the triumphant warriors that, in the 
fourth movement, crowns the symphony. Both these fig¬ 
ures, I grant you, are somewhat imperfect; but still, I 
insist, in some such sense Kant will henceforth be our com¬ 
panion, — the leader who inspires us while we no longer 
see him at the head, the man whose precise system we no 
longer hold, but who still is the creator of our thought. 

I must indeed have failed entirely in my summary of 
Kant’s own theoretical views, in the last lecture, if I did 
not suggest to you how full Kant’s cautious and skeptical 
doctrine is of motives that will lead us beyond him. Ke- 
member how, for the first, he declared the world of the 
things in themselves to be wholly inaccessible to our intel¬ 
lect, just because the world for our intellect is our own 
world. The search for accessible truth, thinks Kant, is 
then the search for one’s own personal larger self. Be- 


FICHTE. 


139 


cause I am sane, because I have what Kant calls unity of 
apperception in me, because I need an orderly conscious¬ 
ness, therefore it is that the world of sense and of expe¬ 
rience has an outwardly visible good order about it. My 
understanding, working upon sense, gives laws to nature, 
because if there were no such laws given by my under¬ 
standing I should have no true inner experience at all. 
The show world of experience is the poem of our construc¬ 
tive imagination, the product, then, of our deepest nature, 
of our largest selves. Moreover, even Kant, with all 
his caution, has to speak of that true self, to which you 
and I alike appeal, whenever we discourse about the 
things of space and time, as if it were something that we 
all shared in, a certain universal self, whose offspring are 
we all, with our flying moments of sense, our weak efforts 
at truth, our study of experience, our common trust in 
understanding. The world that we know is, according to 
Kant, the world, not of dead outer things* but of human 
thoughts; and when we try to get at truth we are trying 
to find how the world in space and time would seem to 
the experience of a perfectly sane and rational and far- 
seeing onlooker; in other words, we are trying, all of us 
alike, as we think, to find out the mind of the ideal man. 
Well, I say, that is the essence of Kant’s thought, re¬ 
stated in one word. 

II. 

And now for a very natural extension of this view. I 
suggest this extension here first merely as a possible view, 
then as the one that we shall find history developing. You 
will think it at first fantastic, but I shall not try as yet to 
defend or to attack it. I am so far only chronicler. 

Grant, if you will, the existence of such a universe as 
Kant describes, a universe of numerous, free, but ignorant 
moral agents, each naturally engaged in imaginatively 
building up, with an unconscious but thoughtful art, an 
inner personal world, in the sense-forms of space and 


140 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


time, and through, numerous forms of thought, applied 
to experience by their various constructive imaginations. 
Each one of these moral agents is bound, by his manhood 
and by his rationality, to serve an unseen and eternal 
moral law, and to believe in a divine order that supports 
this law. Such a universe as this of Kant, viewed as it 
were from without, suggests irresistibly an interpretation 
which at first sight may seem as romantic as indemonstra¬ 
ble, but which is at all events not excluded by the facts. 
Let us look at them dispassionately, — these moral agents, 
blind to absolute truth, but each and all properly destined 
to be willing servants of an unseen order; world-creators, 
meanwhile, each and all of them, but creators solely of 
their inner worlds, communing somehow with one another, 
by virtue of their common rationality, but cut off from 
things in themselves. How does such a state of things 
appear? Does it not suggest at once a plan of reality 
which might not yet demonstrably, but just possibly, stand 
for the true divine order itself ? Might not this whole 
universe of the apparently separate and sense-encom¬ 
passed creatures be an organized spiritual community ? — 
where, like bees working each in his own part of the cell- 
wax, but all combining to build the honey-laden comb, 
these creatures, in the very isolation and darkness of each 
life, labored together for the realization, — yes, I mean it 
literally, — for the very expressing and constituting of 
God’s life; a divine life, I repeat, of infinite complexity, 
whose purposes were so manifold that an endless number 
of agents might be needed to embody them; whose ideals 
were so lofty that only such courage and fidelity and de¬ 
votion as finite beings, in this ignorance and isolation, 
would have opportunity to develop, could serve the stern 
and noble ends of the divine decrees. Suppose, in a 
word, that the infinite whole made up of these finite lives 
were itself the divine life. From such a point of view, 
which I now suggest only by way of a pure hypothesis, 


FICHTE. 


141 


could not this Kantian universe be both interpreted, and, 
after a fashion, even justified ? To be sure, by such an 
interpretation it would be indeed transformed. In my 
opening lecture I ventured to suggest to you the doctrine 
that the universe, despite its seemingly stubborn physical 
fixity, is a live thing, an infinite spirit. According to 
Kant, the world of the natural order, in space and in 
time, cannot be thus alive, simply because, apart from our 
sense and our constructive imagination, this natural order 
has no existence. Spinoza’s substance, then, would be for 
Kant a mere mirage; but now, as you see, the true uni¬ 
verse for Kant consists of perceiving moral agents, and of 
the dim and shadowy things in themselves, and of what 
the practical reason postulates; and that is all. If this 
be so, however, do we care much for those shadowy things 
in themselves? Perhaps they are n’t worth knowing. 
Perhaps they even do not exist at all. Our inner world 
does n’t contain them. They are no object of natural 
science. You can’t weigh them or measure them, much 
less see them. Perhaps they are, as Hume would say, 
“ sophistry and illusion.” What, then, remains to us ? 
Why, precisely this: the world of the natural order, which, 
mirage though it be, is the very mirror of our sanity, and 
is therefore useful enough; this, and the world of our 
fellow-men, the world of practical and therefore of spirit¬ 
ual relationships, the world of live beings, ignorant, but 
rational like ourselves. With these we live, we act; we 
seek to realize through them the moral order; we respect 
their rights, we love them, we treat them as God’s chil¬ 
dren. But see: perhaps, in dealing with them, we touch 
the divine order itself. Perhaps, to use a more modern 
phrase, God simply differentiates himself into the forms 
of all these live beings, who may be, for all we know, as 
numerous, and as various in their degrees of loftiness, as 
the stars and the atoms of physics. Perhaps in the very 
depths of their finite ignorance he does n’t quite lose him- 


142 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


self; perhaps his transcendent wisdom consists simply in 
knowing, in establishing, in harmonizing their relation¬ 
ships, so that, as Schiller says, 44 while no one of them is 
his equal, his own endlessness foams up to him from out 
this beaker of the infinite world of spirits.” Then, indeed, 
their lonely heroism is his triumph ; their seeming isola¬ 
tion is simply the manner in which he realizes, through 
them, the organization of his own life; their diversity and 
ignorance are merely his way of expressing the unity in 
variety, the completeness in differentiation, of his own 
manifold nature. If so, then God is n’t somewhere far off 
there, outside the world, so that we feel in vain for him 
amongst the dead and dismal things in themselves. God 
is in you, just in so far as you are alive and heartv' and 
humane; in your human relationships, just so far as they 
are devoted, loyal, organic ; in your very ignorance, in so 
far as it enables you to be heroic; in your very finiteness, 
in so far as it is a condition for your accomplishment of 
a definite task. God, outside of such a world of finite 
agents, would rejoice only in his empty infinity ; he would 
be, as Schiller also said, in the poem from which I have 
just quoted,—he would be 44 friendless,” he would 44 suffer 
lack.” To be the God in reality, he would have to enter 
into finite form, and preserve his infinity merely through 
the unity, the organization, the conscious spiritual form of 
his universe of active creatures. We were wrong then, 
when we sought him as it were afar off, in the mirage 
of space and time, or even in the laws of outer nature as 
Spinoza did. We were even wrong to say, as Kant said : 
We never take hold of his real self, we only postulate 
him. The fact is that, in our spiritual life, we already 
possess him, are flesh of his flesh, are one with him, just 
in so far as we have vitality, courage, loyalty, wealth, 
strength, sanity, of will and of understanding. We know 
of him just so much as we are. And we are of him just 
so much as we are morally worthy to be. 


FICHTE. 


143 


This is the interpretation which dawns upon us when 
we reflect awhile upon Kant’s universe. Mystery en¬ 
shrouds his world. The curtain of sense is u so thick ! ” 
Such darkness is for us beyond it! We know so little. 
We have nothing left us but morality; and that is just a 
postulate. But no, is this so little, after all? Suppose 
that the curtain itself were the picture, that the dark mys¬ 
tery lay simply in this, that we have refused to recognize 
as divine so much of God’s own essence as we ourselves 
possess, and have failed to see how our life, just in so far 
as it is spiritual, is, not a postulating, but a realizing of 
the divine life. Suppose all this to be no mere hypothe¬ 
sis, but a certainty. Would it not transform our philo¬ 
sophy? Well, I suggest here this transformation, because, 
as an idea, it was precisely the transformation of the 
Kantian doctrine which was the common undertaking of 
the great post-Kantian German idealists, Fichte, Schel- 
ling, and Hegel. 

Philosophy is full of surprises. Just when you think 
that the road is ended against a dark and impassable wall, 
the door opens, as it opened to Kant. And just when 
you think again that Kant’s discovery is the end, a new 
life for the first time begins. This is the new life of 
modern idealism. It accepts in one sense Kant’s result. 
Yes, it goes further in negation than even he went. He 
held fast by the things in themselves, whose existence he 
acknowledged, although he could know nothing about 
them. The later .German idealists say frankly that they 
care nothing for the things in themselves, and either 
doubt or deny whether there are any such things at all. 
Kant, however, paused at the threshold of the show-world. 
Beyond, he said, dwells, as we must faithfully believe, a 
God whom we serve, but who is forever the unknown God. 
The later idealists say: Indeed, the deepest truth is the 
truth of the manly will to act morally; but then this will 
itself embodies in each of us a portion of the divine per- 


144 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


sonality. This is, so to speak, the real presence of God in 
us, to wit, just as much of our own nature as is holy. Our 
holiness, if we have any rag of holiness about us, much 
more if we are filled with heroism and with reasonable 
service, is, in its own inner quality, divine. As for God, 
his life is just this eternal sacrifice of his infinity by 
entering into the rational lives of a world of limited, but 
moral beings. For in this sacrifice he wins himself. He 
enjoys his peace, not apart from the world, 

“ Where never creeps a cloud nor moves a wind, 

Nor ever falls the least white star of snow 
Nor ever lowest moan of thunder rolls, 

Nor sound of human sorrow mounts.” 

No, his peace is the peace of triumphing in the midst of 
our world of agony and of passion, as the tragic poet 
triumphs even while losing himself in the sufferings of his 
own creations. God’s life is simply all life, and it is 
not concealed, but revealed by our own lives. God lives 
in every kindly friendship, in every noble deed, in every 
well-ordered society, in every united people, in every 
sound law, in every wise thought. He has no life beyond 
such rationality. His personality is just this, the com¬ 
munion, the intercourse, the organization of all finite per¬ 
sons. Here, you see, is in one sense indeed a new notion 
of personality. A person beyond our whole world, even 
of morality, was what we had hoped for. The new doc¬ 
trine declares that the infinite one pervades the whole 
finite world of spirits, and simply lives by constituting, by 
unifying, and by enjoying, this very life of ours and of all 
our brethren, the rational beings, wherever and whatever 
they may be. Thus indeed we are limited, and may be 
even transient embodiments of God’s life; but we our¬ 
selves, in so far as we make for unity and for righteous¬ 
ness, are in nature one with him. New is the doctrine, I 
say, namely, as a reflective speculation in modern thought. 
But in one sense, as these idealists are never weary of 


FICHTE. 


145 


pointing out, it is a very old doctrine; it is the very core 
of Christian faith. When Paul said to the faithful, “Ye 
are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God ; ” when 
the fourth Gospel makes the Logos say, “ I am the vine, 
ye are the branches;” when the whole doctrine of the 
church rested upon the idea of a God revealed in the 
flesh; when even a simpler and more primitive Christian 
tradition, that of the first synoptic Gospel, represents the 
final judgment as dependent upon the principle, “ Inas¬ 
much as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto 
me; ” when, finally, the deep mysticism of the historical 
church represented the faithful as actually feeding upon 
God’s very essence and living thereby, — what doctrine 
was this but the very teaching upon which rests the new 
philosophy which now undertakes to transform Kant’s 
dark world of faithful and isolated beings into the world 
of God’s own realization and presence? These moral 
agents of Kant’s world are not isolated, for, ignorant as 
they are, they work together. And what better revelation 
of a divine order than a world where spirits can com¬ 
mune and can work together ? 

Once more, as you see, the philosopher invents nothing; 
he only reflects. In reflection he has cast down the dog¬ 
mas of a blind faith; in reflection he builds anew their 
rational and eternal significance. So, at least, these Ger¬ 
man idealists hold. As for me, I am so far, as I just 
observed, a mere chronicler. This doctrine, too, may be 
an imperfect speculation. I am not now defending it, 
but only expounding it. As expositor I present it now 
before you. So far we find it as an hypothesis. It needs 
proof. Perhaps it will need further alteration and adjust¬ 
ment. At all events, here is for us a new experience in 
philosophy, namely, the very essence of Christianity em¬ 
bodied in a speculative theory. 


146 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


III. 

Meanwhile, the form which this doctrine takes in Ger¬ 
man thought is one dependent upon the special conditions 
of a very charming and a very wayward age, the age of 
German classical and romantic literature. Whether or 
no you find this sort of speculation in itself satisfactory, 
you will at all events be interested in watching with me, 
during the rest of this lecture and during the next, some 
of the more obvious and immediately human aspects of a 
time so full of fire, of imagination, of productiveness, of 
faults, of wanderings, and of glory. But let us proceed 
at once to the man who first embodied this new idealistic 
doctrine in a series of writings wherein the spontaneity, 
the eloquence, the confidence, the complexity, and the 
fragmentariness of the work done reflect very well the 
character of this period. I refer to Fichte. 

Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the first of the great succes¬ 
sors of Kant. He was a man three years younger than 
Schiller, thirteen years younger than Goethe, and thirty- 
eight years younger than Kant himself. The story of his 
life is one of ardor, poverty, high aims, brilliant literary 
success, bitter conflicts, and an untimely death in his 
country’s service. For at the close of his career, during 
the great war of liberation, in 1813, he and his devoted 
wife busied themselves in the encouragement of the war¬ 
riors and in the care of the wounded. Fichte, as you see, 
had just passed the age of fifty. His wife, while nursing 
wounded soldiers, was stricken with typhus fever. She 
recovered, but the contagion had already passed to Fichte, 
to whom it proved fatal, in January, 1814. A nobler 
death, in a more heroic time, was scarcely possible to a 
professor of philosophy and a patriot. Fichte was spared 
the pain of seeing the darker years of national stagnation 
and of illiberalism in Germany, that followed the triumph 
over Napoleon. And for the rest, his work was in one 


FICHTE. 147 

sense already done. He had influenced younger men who 
by that time had already transcended him. 

This work had been, however, manifold and exacting. 
Fichte had a temperament at once logical and enthusias¬ 
tic. The struggle between a keen and subtle intellect and 
a warm and imaginative emotional nature, had joined it¬ 
self with outer hindrances to make his early years event¬ 
ful and arduous. The son of a poor weaver, and one of a 
large family of children, Fichte chanced to attract, while 
yet a boy, the kindly attention of a nobleman, who 
adopted him, showed him a little of the great world, and 
then, suddenly dying, left him a penniless youth, only the 
more keenly ashamed, under such circumstances, of his 
poverty. At the university he supported himself by 
private teaching, was more than once near to despair in 
his neediness, and at length, after graduation, became a 
Hofmeister in a Zurich family. While here, in 1788, he 
met his future wife, a certain Johanna Rahn, a niece of 
the poet Klopstock. They were soon betrothed, but were 
too poor to marry until 1793. 

Fichte’s since published love-letters to his betrothed are 
described, by those who have read them through (I have 
not), as somewhat pedantic — the natural product of a 
mind conscientious, learned, but impulsive, and so far at 
once flighty and even a little despondent. He is fond of 
accusing himself of many faults, laments his restlessness 
and unsteadiness of ideas and plans, knows no guiding 
star but her love, and wonders what Providence can be 
meaning with him. Meanwhile, during this period of his 
betrothal, he changed his position often and traveled 
much, looking for a permanent occupation, — a project- 
maker and an unpromising wanderer. In philosophy he 
was so far a sort of amateur Spinozist, and occupied a 
position to which he later looked back as one of darkness 
and of the gall of bitterness. Suddenly a change came. 
It was 1790, and he was now twenty-eight years old. 


148 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


While in Leipzig he undertook to give a young man pri¬ 
vate lessons in philosophy, and to that end took up for 
the first time the study of Kant. Very soon he wrote 
to Fraulein Rahn in an entirely new vein. It is a won¬ 
derful philosophy, this of Kant, he asserts. It tames a 
man’s wild imagination ; it gives one “ an indescribable 
elevation above all earthly affairs.” “ I have obtained 
from it,” he continues, “ a nobler ideal. I don’t concern 
myself so much now with outward things; I am busied 
within myself. Thence has come to me a peace that I 
have never before known. In the midst of my perplexing 
material situation, I have been enjoying the most blessed 
days of my experience. I mean to devote to this philoso¬ 
phy at least some years of my life. It is above all con¬ 
ception a difficult doctrine, and it deserves to be made 
easier. Its basis, to be sure, is a mass of head-splitting 
speculations that have no immediate bearing on human 
life, but the consequences are vastly important to an age 
which, like ours, is morally corrupt to the very source; 
and one would deserve well of his time if he made these 
consequences luminous to the world. Tell your dear 
father that he and I used to err in our investigations 
about the necessity of all man’s acts. ... I have found 
out now that man’s will is free, and that not happiness, 
but worthiness is the end of our being. And I ask your 
pardon, too, that I used to teach you false doctrine about 
these things. Henceforth believe your own feeling, even 
if you can’t refute a sophist.” 

One might wonder whether this confession to Johanna 
Rahn, of the superlative blessedness of days passed out of 
her company, and alone with the “ Critique of Pure Rea¬ 
son,” might not have made her a trifle jealous of Kant; 
but in fact, as she was a person of both maturity and dis¬ 
cretion, being four years the senior of Fichte himself, she 
wrote him that, since after all he appeared unable to earn 
his living, and since her father’s means were now apparently 


FICHTE. 


149 


sufficient, he might return to Zurich and marry her, and 
then devote himself to philosophy at his leisure. A curi¬ 
ous wavering followed in the mind and conduct of Kant’s 
new disciple. He wrote to his brother that Fraulein 
Kahn was indeed the noblest soul in the world, but that 
for one thing he himself was a wanderer, an independent 
creature, and that for the rest something new had just 
come into his life, which seemed to drive him out to con¬ 
quer the whole world afresh. Marriage would clip a 
man’s wings, would imprison him yonder in Switzerland, 
would perhaps hinder his philosophizing in this wondrous 
and novel way. He felt restless; he was even often dis¬ 
posed to flee altogether and never write to her again. 

To Johanna herself, Fichte’s letters expressed of course 
nothing of these rebellious sentiments, and I mention 
them only to suggest a little of the ferment which in this 
needy young tutor’s soul was then under way. He 
must do everything, — teach Johanna the new insight, 
marry, cease this wavering that had made him like a 
wave of the sea; and yet, he must also convert the whole 
world to the Kantian doctrine, in all its spirituality and 
earnestness; he must save his countrymen in this time of 
revolution and of corruption; he must wander, work, 
think incessantly. One has here, you see, something of 
the typical erudite German of the story-books, crude and 
elevated in one — lover, world-stormer, sentimentalist, and 
cynic, all at the same time. For Fichte, too, was occasion¬ 
ally a bit of a cynic. “ When I met Johanna,” he once 
writes to his brother, “ my heart was empty. I just let 
her love me. I did n’t care much about it.” “ Dear 
one,” he writes to her in all sincerity, at about the same 
time, “take me with all my faults. What a creature I am! 
Men have attributed to me fixity of character, but I have 
always been merely the creature of circumstances. You 
have the stronger soul. Give fixity to my waverings.” 1 

1 The present sketch is dependent largely upon that of Julian 


150 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

In this state of mind Fichte journeyed, in the way of 
business, to accept a tutor’s position at Warsaw. He 
failed there to give satisfaction, because his French pro¬ 
nunciation was poor, and on his way back he called upon 
Kant at Konigsberg, in July, 1791. The aged, prudent, 
and, as you will remember, highly economical philosopher 
regarded this reverent, fiery, but obviously impecunious 
young disciple with a certain suspicion, and received his 
confidences coolly. The rebuff only heated Fichte the 
more. He tarried in Konigsberg two months, in order 
during that time to write, for presentation to Kant, a work 
on religious philosophy, which, once finished, proved to be 
so thoroughly in Kant’s spirit that, when in the spring of 
the next year the book was published anonymously, it was 
very generally hailed by Kant’s admirers as a new pro¬ 
duction of the master’s own genius. Kant himself had to 
correct this misapprehension, and in doing so named, and 
now with warm praise, the real author. Thus at one 
stroke, as it were, Fichte’s career was made. He had won 
the great philosopher’s approval and the ear of the public 
at the same time. Within another year he returned to 
Zurich. He was at length famous, and, as his beloved 
was now, by chance, even more obviously in comfortable 
circumstances than she had been at the time when she 
wrote the aforementioned highly practical letter, there 
was nothing further to hinder his marriage, which took 
place in October, 1793, and remained to the end a very 
happy one. In 1794 came the call to the University of 
Jena, which was then at the centre of the mental life of 
Germany. 

IY. 

Fichte’s career has thus been suggested to you through 
a sketch of its first important crisis. There is the same 
interesting union of the great, the ardent, the thoughtful, 

Schmidt, as given in the fifth edition of his Geschichte d. deutschen 
Literatur seit Lessing’s Tod , vol. i. p. 347 sqq. 


FICHTE. 


151 


and, if one wants to be frank, of the petty also, in the 
rest of his life. Accused of atheism in 1799, the heroic, 
but lamentably indiscreet man replied to an unjust charge 
in so violent and unhappy a fashion as to make him 
thenceforth impossible at Jena, so that even the chief 
patron of liberal culture and free thought in Germany, 
Goethe’s own duke at Weimar, had regretfully, and by 
Goethe’s personal advice, to dismiss him from his chair. 
Then followed, however, tbe Berlin career, with its noble 
ending. Later years, indeed, in some respects mellowed 
Fichte; but to the end he was always a fighter, and a 
man of books as well, with all the faults of both these 
species, with a temperament whose lofty heroism and true 
piety could not save it from an appearance of polemical 
narrowness and furious self-assertion whenever he was in 
an actual conflict with any man or party. In argument 
Fichte is, so to speak, all temperament. His dialectic is 
indeed keen, his analysis is deep and searching, his sense 
of the unity of all science is profoundly rational; but 
deeper than all is the strong sense of his own personality, 
the love of making articulate his own character, which led 
him to say with truth, but with a peculiar and individual 
strength of accent: “What system of philosophy you 
hold depends wholly upon what manner of man you are.” 
Hence, in all his lengthy and frequently ver f technical 
writings, he after all never merely argues ; he appeals to 
more than your understanding; he appeals to your honor, 
to your dignity of soul, to agree with his system. He 
would not merely convince you; he would convert you 
from an error which, as he feels, shows in you a defect of 
character. Goethe used to say that, by way of amuse¬ 
ment, he occasionally read Fichte, “ just to let myself be 
abused by him for a little while.” Meanwhile, Fichte 
abused frankly his own early blindness, before Kant came 
into his soul, with all the ardor of the ransomed convert. 
What Kant had ransomed him from was Spinozism, and 


152 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the dread bondage of the outer world. What Fichte con¬ 
ceived himself to have learned from Kant was therefore 
this: The rational subject builds its own world , and the 
dead external world is naught . What Fichte added to 
Kant, as he went on, was however somewhat elaborate, 
and constitutes, along with the strictly Kantian elements, 
his own system, which is almost universally but rather 
inaptly named “ Subjective idealism.” 

Let me state it, too, first in rough outline, then a little 
more systematically. As everybody knows, Fichte ac¬ 
cepted Kant’s result in so far as Kant said that space and 
time are facts only for our consciousness, and that we 
can’t know any things in themselves beyond us. Only 
Fichte went further. He denied that there can exist any 
things in themselves beyond consciousness at all. The 
world that we spiritual beings know, however hard and 
fast it may seem, however helplessly we ourselves may 
individually be subjected to its facts, is still, in the last 
analysis, there only in so far as we recognize it as there 
for us. The world, then, is the world that the self makes. 
So Fichte’s chief principles are these: (1) All philosophy 
has its source in one primal truth, namely, the truth that 
living and voluntary selves freely choose to assert them¬ 
selves, and so to build up their whole organized world ; 
(2) The fhoral law is, in consequence of this, really prior 
to all other knowledge, and conditions all that we theo¬ 
retically know. For as you see, knowing a world is for 
Fichte making a world, consciously recognizing the truth, 
acting then in this way or in that. But the law of action, 
the moral law, thus becomes for Fichte the basis of all 
theoretical knowing ; (3) The apparently fatal outer 
world about us is simply, in Fichte’s bold and stirringly 
fantastic words, “ the stuff, the material (the opportun¬ 
ity), for our duty, made manifest to our senses (‘ das ver . 
sinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht ’).” Beyond all this, 
however, in the fourth place, Fichte went later, when he 


FICHTE. 


153 


developed more clearly a doctrine obviously latent and 
implied in his earlier works, namely, the doctrine that 
the universe of the self-asserting and world - creating 
selves, each of whom sees about him in daily life simply 
the very stuff and fibre of his moral law made manifest 
to his senses as an opportunity for his moral work, — 
that this universe of selves, I say, constitutes the life and 
embodiment of the one true and infinite Reason, God’s 
will, which, itself supreme and far above the level of our 
finite personality, uses even our conscious lives and wills 
as part of its own life. This doctrine Fichte himself, in 
one of his later works (“ The Way to the Blessed Life 
identifies with the teaching of the fourth Gospel. Ac¬ 
cording to this view, you see, God, in so far as he reveals 
himself, is indeed the vine, and we, in so far as we truly 
live, are the sap-laden and fruitful branches. The only 
real world is the world of conscious activity, and so of 
spiritual relationships, of society, of serious business, of 
friendship, of love, of law, of national existence, — in a 
word, of work; as for matter, that is the mere show stuff 
that is needed to embody, to express, to give form, sta¬ 
bility, outline, as it were, to our moral work. 

I may put Fichte’s theory of the external world in yet 
another fashion, thus: In company with another spirit, 
so Fichte thinks, I can only work in case he and I have 
a sense world in common. Hence our common devotion, 
our social enthusiasm, our duty, requires of us all that 
we try to embody our ideals in the same sense forms. If 
we succeed, we all see the same houses and streets, the 
same people moving, the same flags waving. Seeing thus 
in common, we can work in common. If we did not find 
out how to work in common, we should express the vague¬ 
ness of our immoral isolation in the separateness of our 
various sense worlds; in other words, we should dream or 
be delirious. I dream when I am not at work. When I 
am strenuously active I am awake ; and therefore, in so far 


154 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. - 


as I am effectively righteous, I see the same stuff that my 
fellow-workers see. Matter is thus the mere condition of 
our common tasks. Each one of us creates it for himself. 
We create together and in agreement, in so far as we 
want to toil for a common purpose. And the rationality 
of the divine plan secures to us a power thus to create 
and to work together. Meanwhile, good and bad men, 
noble and base men, strong and weak men, really do not 
see precisely the same sense world. The seeming outer 
world for any man actually varies with his moral percep¬ 
tions. The sense world is saner and more orderly for 
the cultivated man than for the savage, for the good 
man than for the man absorbed in the pleasure of the 
moment, for the wise man than for the fool. And thus 
the doctrine conforms, thinks Fichte, to the actual facts. 
“ The necessity,” says the philosopher, “ with which the 
belief in the reality of phenomena forces itself upon us 
is a moral necessity, the only one that is possible for a 
moral being; herein our duty reveals itself.” And thus 
we have, in the barest outline, the famous “ subjective 
idealism ” of Fichte. One might better call it “ ethical 
idealism” in its extremest expression. So much, then, 
for my first rough summary. And now what shall we say 
of this sort of idealism ? 

A bold, yes, an extravagant doctrine! you will say. 
Kant’s things in themselves have gone out of this world 
of Fichte. Yet somehow we at first scarcely miss them. 
Kant, to be sure, felt quite out of place in Fichte’s fantas¬ 
tic universe, and publicly expressed his repentance, ere he 
died, that he had ever encouraged this young disciple so 
freely. “ Save me from my friends,” cried Kant, very 
sincerely, in a printed note of explanation. The transfor¬ 
mation lay of course in Fichte’s determination not merely 
to do away with Kant’s things in themselves, but to see 
at once into the very heart of the moral order, whose 
supremacy Kant had only postulated. If you now ask 


FICHTE. 


155 


me, however, whether, as modern idealist, I myself accept 
Fichte’s statement as the final truth of the doctrine, I 
respond of course at once that I do not. This is n’t the 
idealism that has, as idealism ought to have, a deep and 
genuine respect for the natural order and for experience. 
Fichte’s easy disposal of the whole external and natural 
order is, indeed, not only bold, hut quite unwarranted. 
The modern student of nervous physiology, of the facts 
of evolution, and of the interdependence of the physical 
and moral worlds generally, is not likely to find Fichte’s 
“ ethical idealism ” anywhere near to the last word. 
More philosophical surprises await us hereafter; upon 
newer insights the thought of to-day is based; and in 
some, not in all respects, the whole later German ideal¬ 
istic movement, which Fichte began, represents to my 
mind, as you will later see, a circuit to one side of the 
main stream of modern thought. Only, as we shall learn, 
from this circuit thought returns enriched. This expe¬ 
rience also will have its part in the outcome ; and he who 
has not once fairly viewed Fichte’s universe will see less 
than he ought to see in the universe of to-day. 

As an experience, then, as one more of the many ways 
of looking at truth, I want you to consider this doctrine. 
Think of Fichte, when you read or hear of him, as one 
embodiment only of that beautiful, that profoundly wise 
and instructive, waywardness of German thought and 
sentiment, which we all know so well to-day in song, in 
story, and in the drama, as well as in the other arts. It 
is this same waywardness that has given us “ Faust,” and 
Heine’s “Buch der Lieder;” that instantaneously trans¬ 
forms the whole universe for us in any song of Schubert’s 
or of Schumann’s; that builds worlds and casts them 
down in fiery despair in a Wagnerian trilogy. In pre¬ 
sence of this waywardness, not, indeed, of the Germany 
of Bismarck and of the two Williams, but of the now 
almost dead romantic Germany, whose empire, as Jean 


156 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

Paul said, was of the air, — in presence of this wayward¬ 
ness, the world is once for all plastic, changeable ; a world 
of divine or of diabolical ideas, but of ideas that are not 
so much eternal as capricious. Fichte makes this ideal 
world a moral one. Others, as we shall see, will find 
this universe of the selves a universe of romance, of senti¬ 
mentality, of anything but hard fact. Yet think not that 
this capricious world utterly lacks truth. The real world, 
too, once for all flows; flows and changes throughout its 
whole existence, as Heraclitus long ago said; and pre¬ 
serves, too, its sacred and permanent logos just by chan¬ 
ging. Well, it is the office of the wayward to note the 
various aspects of just this change, this plasticity, this 
seemingly hopeless variety, under which the eternal truth 
presents itself to us. In the world of the wayward, no¬ 
thing seems fast. View follows view, romantic theory 
chases romantic theory, until we begin to fear that no¬ 
thing is true, and that here, even as in Hume’s skeptical 
world also, if we find the Holy Grail itself, “ it, too, will 
fade, and crumble into dust.” But, if we watch patiently, 
we shall see that, from this very wealth of forms, the true 
form which is present through all the changes will in 
some fashion ultimately come to light. Fichte’s moral 
universe, where matter is only our duty made manifest 
to our senses, and the universe of the romantic school, 
where all is sentiment, are, after all, fragments of the true 
faith. That thought is the thread which is to guide us 
through the labyrinth. The truth is the whole. Even 
the fantastic has its part therein. 

y. 

But let us look a second time and more closely at 
Fichte’s view. The only perfectly clear thing, he says, 
at the outset of philosophy, is that there is a seif. Any 
self will of course do, but some self one must start with, 
namely, of course, his own. Now a self asserts, “ I am.” 


FICHTE. 


.157 


It also equally asserts, “ Something exists beside me; 
there is a not-self.” If you don’t believe that this is 
always asserted, Fichte invites you to try it and see . 1 
Well, here forthwith is a puzzle. I assert that I exist; 
and then I assert that something exists beside me. Now 
I can of course know myself, it would seem, but how can 
I get outside myself to see what is not myself? How 
come I to guess at the existence of something other than 
I am ? Fichte’s solution is simple. I don't guess at it; 
nor is it a fact forced upon me from without, in any fash¬ 
ion. My true self freely chooses to recognize the exist¬ 
ence of something beside myself as a fact. To be sure, I, 
in my private, empirical, momentary capacity, seem not 
to choose, but helplessly to find this outer existence. 
Really, however, it is my own, my deeper self, whose 
choice is at each moment shown to me. But, then, ob¬ 
serve, unless I thus chose to recognize something beyond 
myself, I should have nothing to do, I should have no¬ 
thing to resist, to fight, to win, to love, — in short, to act 
upon, in any way. The deepest truth, then, is a prac¬ 
tical truth. I need something not myself, in order to be 
active, that is, in order to exist. My very existence is 
practical; it is self-assertion. I exist, so to speak, by 
hurling the fact of my existence at another than myself. 
I limit myself thus, by a foreign somewhat, opaque, ex¬ 
ternal, my own opposite; but my limitation is the free 
choice of my true self. By^ thus limiting myself I give 
myself something to do, and thus win my own very exist¬ 
ence. Yet this opposition, upon which my life is based, 
is an opposition within my deepest nature. I have a 
foreign world as the theatre of my activity; I exist only 
to conquer and win that apparently foreign world to my- 

1 Cf. the noteworthy passage in the Grundlage of 1794, Fichte’s 
Werke, vol. i. p. 253 : “ Dass es ein solches Setzen gebe [namely, of 
the Nicht-lch] kann jeder nur durch seine eigene Erfahrung sich dar- 
thun.” 


158 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

self; I must come to possess it; I must prove that it is 
mine. In the process of thus asserting a foreign world, 
and then actively identifying it as not foreign and exter¬ 
nal, but as our own, our life itself consists. This is what 
is meant by work, by love, by duty. 

But this process, thinks Fichte, is essentially an endless 
one. The more of a self I am, the more of a world out¬ 
side me I need, to develop and to express my energies. 
A busy man needs, and therefore posits, a world full of 
the objects of his business. Without this asserted world 
of objects, he, as busy man, would cease to exist; he 
would, so to speak, retire from business ; he and his busy 
world would stagnate together. This, then, is Fichte’s 
central thought: Your outer world, your not-self, is just 
as large as your own spiritual activity makes it. Fichte 
tries to show in detail how the various forms of our rec¬ 
ognition of outer reality, such as perception, imagination, 
space, time, causality, and the rest, arise. Into such de¬ 
tails I have no time to follow him ; but the essence of his 
doctrine consists in identifying Kant’s theoretical and 
practical reason, and in saying that all our assertion of 
a world beyond, of a world of things and of people, 
merely expresses, in practical form, our assertion of our 
own wealthy and varied determination to be busy with 
things and with people. Thus, then, each of us builds 
his own world. He builds it in part unconsciously ; and 
therefore he seems to his ordinary thought not to have 
built it at all, but merely to find it. Each of us sees, at 
any moment, not only the world that we are now making 
by this act, but the world that we have made by all our 
past acts. And hence our whole life is thus consolidated 
before our eyes; our world is the world of our conscious 
and unconscious deeds. Thus we often regard it as our 
fate, and talk of an external substance, as Spinoza did. 
In this we are wrong. No activity, no world ; no self, no 
not-self; no self-assertion, no facts to assert ourselves 
upon. So, at least, Fichte teaches. 


FICHTE. 


159 


But, you will say, is not the outcome of all this a sort 
of solitary self-existence, where each one of us is shut up 
to his own life? Has the spiritual world no absolute 
reality ? Is it, too, the mere dream of our activity ? No, 
thinks Fichte, not so; and here comes a part of his doc¬ 
trine that was to himself the hardest part. He never 
made it perfectly clear, although he tried again and again. 
To you I can only suggest it. When we reflect upon our 
inner activity we find it, after all, not an individual self- 
will, but a deep longing for universal life. The true self, 
therefore (and so far the thing is indeed clear enough), 
the true self is n’t the private person, the individual called 
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the impecunious tutor, the waver¬ 
ing lover of Johanna Rahn, the professor in Jena, falsely 
accused of atheism. This true self, thinks Fichte, is some¬ 
thing infinite. It needs a whole endless world of life to 
express itself in. Its moral law could n’t be expressed in 
full on any one planet. Johann Gottlieb may be one of 
its prophets; but the heavens could not contain its glory 
and its eternal business. No one of us ever finally gets 
at the true Reason which is the whole of him. Each one 
of us is a partial embodiment, an instrument of the moral 
law, and our very consciousness tells us that this law is 
the expression of an infinite world life. The true self 
is the will, which is everywhere present in things. This 
will is, indeed, the vine, whereof our wills are the branches. 
Fichte has innumerable ways of trying to tell finally and 
clearly the story of what the infinite will is and does. It 
is eternally asserting itself afresh, through countless finite 
wills. Each one of these finite wills, as moral agent, 
builds its sense world, and finds, in this sense world, the 
manifestations of other agents. For all the agents, as 
ministers of the divine, work together. The moral con¬ 
sciousness says to each, “ If I am real, so also are these. 
Work with them; respect their rights; honor their free¬ 
dom ; join with them to build a higher and freer world 


160 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

than any of us now see.” In this organization of life, 
even here on earth, in this kindliness, this honorable con¬ 
duct, this social unity, which constitutes our better life, 
something of the divine will is thus realized. But the 
problem of its complete realization is an endless one. 
Nowhere, in all the infinity of countless worlds of moral 
struggle, can the divine will be fully realized. As I my¬ 
self seek to assert myself all my life long, but never suc¬ 
ceed fully in my task, am always struggling with obsta¬ 
cles, casting aside all that I have won, in order to pursue 
new triumphs, even so the divine will is restless through 
all its worlds, and pulses from self to self, frpin attainment 
to attainment, in an everlasting search for a complete 
self-realization. The true God is, therefore, as Fichte 
holds, existent in our universe as the pulse of its moral 
order, as the life of lives, the eternal spiritual self-creator, 
whose work is never done, who rests never, and who is no 
one individual being anywhere, but who is the live and 
organic unity of all beings. Even herein, however, thinks 
Fichte, he finds his highest peace, that in endless toil he 
shall reassert himself, and shall win the world which is 
his embodiment. 

VI. 

The completest popular statement possible of Fichte’s 
system is given in his own words in his book on the “ Vo¬ 
cation of Man.” This work was first published in 1800, 
shortly after Fichte left Jena, and was no doubt meant to 
justify him, in the eyes of the general public, against the 
charge of atheism. The argument of the work falls into 
three parts, denominated respectively, “ Doubt,” “ Know¬ 
ledge,” and “Faith.” Under the first head Fichte de¬ 
scribes the views and problems of his own pre-Kantian 
period. Under the second head he sets forth the revolu¬ 
tion produced in his thought by the influence of Kant. 
In the third part he explains the conceptions of the moral 
order and of the infinite will. The style is eloquent, tire- 


FICHTE. 


161 


less, too full of explanation and of illustrations ; the work 
as a whole is profound and inspiring. Let us hear yet a 
word of Fichte’s own from this book, in a fine passage 
where he appeals direct to this infinite itself. “ Supreme 
and living will,” he says, “ whom no name names, to thee 
may I lift up my soul, for thou and I are not parted. 
Thy voice sounds in me, and mine again in thee; and all 
my thoughts, if only they be true, are thought in thee. 
I comprehend thee not, yet in thee I comprehend myself 
and the world. . . . Best fitted to know thee is childlike 
and submissive simplicity. ... I know not what thou art 
for thyself, . . . and after thousand lives lived through, 
my spirit will comprehend thee as little as now, in this 
house of clay. For what I have once won to my compre¬ 
hension becomes even thereby finite. . . . Nay, I wish 
not to know of thee what thou art in thyself. I know 
thy bearings on my life. . . . Thou producest in me 
the knowledge of my duty. . . . Thou knowest what I 
think and will; . . . thou choosest that my free obedience 
shall be effective to all eternity; . . . thou doest, for thy 
will is itself Deed. Thou livest and art, for thou dost 
know, will, and do, and art ever present to my insight; 
but what thou art I shall never wholly know through all 
the eternities.” 

This, you see, is Fichte’s theism. The essence of it is, 
with all the analogies between the two, something very 
different from Kant’s postulating of a God beyond the 
world of sense. The fact is that, for Fichte, my own 
vocation is the central fact of consciousness. But what 
my vocation is, is a matter for deeper consideration. 
And, if I duly consider my vocation, I find that there is 
a measureless strength of restless will about me, which 
demands an infinity of time in which to work out my 
vocation, and an infinite business to meet, with its magni¬ 
tude, the endlessly significant office that I choose for my¬ 
self. Plainly, then, I, the true self, am not the mere self 


162 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

of the world of sense, the self who eats and talks, and has 
this name. It might be truer to say that I, the real, the 
deeper, the relatively impersonal, or, rather, if you like, 
the genuinely and essentially personal self, need, and so 
express myself in, the world of social business. All we 
human selves are thus one true organic self, in so far as 
we work together. And this organic self we all of us ex¬ 
perience just in so far as we do toil together. But not 
even this larger self of society can fully express the voca¬ 
tion which constitutes me in my true, in my deeper per¬ 
sonality. No, my true vocation is endless, is eternal. By 
it I am linked, not through a mere postulate, but through 
all my deeper self-consciousness, to the very essence of the 
divine personality. When I reflect upon this truth, lo! 
my earthly existence, in its darkness and limitations, van¬ 
ishes from before my eyes. With you I stand in presence 
of the divinest of mysteries, the communion of all the 
spirits in the one self whose free act is the very heart’s 
blood of our spiritual being. Nay, must it not, then, 
thinks Fichte, must not this be true of us ? We are dead, 
and our life is hid in God. He is the only self. His 
will is the only will; his self-assertion lives in our every 
deed and love; his restlessness trembles in every throb of 
our hearts; his joy thrills in every triumph of our cour¬ 
age. 

Well, in this thought, thus eloquently suggested by the 
restless and unsatisfying Fichte, you have the beginnings 
of the post-Kantian German idealism. The question, 
w Who is the true self ? ” thus becomes central in thought. 
Kant had really made it so, when he made all reasonable 
experience a continual appeal of my momentary to my 
larger self. Fichte merely universalizes the problem. 
The world is the poem thus dreamed out by the inner life. 
Who, then, is the dreamer ? That is the question of the 
romantic period of German speculation. If you remem. 
ber this as the central problem in all that is to follow in 


FICHTE. 


163 


the two succeeding lectures, you will have in hand the 
thread that will guide us through this labyrinth of Ger¬ 
man speculation. Do not tremble, I beg you, before the 
mysterious seeming of the region into which we enter. 
The thread, firmly held, will soon lead us back again to 
the study of the natural order, back again to the king¬ 
dom of modern science, to the region where the facts are 
indeed stubborn, but where the deepest problems, as the 
idealists will meanwhile have taught us, must needs be 
spiritual. To teach, indeed, just this lesson, the spiritu¬ 
ality of the stubborn world of outer fact, was the true 
mission of these idealists, who so often despised facts. 


LECTURE VI. 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 

Fichte, as we have seen, had begun by setting aside 
Kant’s things in themselves. What, after all, thinks he, 
is the use of even mentioning such mysteries as the dead 
things in themselves, whereof you only declare that they 
are unknowable ? What if they are said to exist ? Un¬ 
less we can know them, they are to us as good as nought. 
But now, for others besides Fichte, Kant’s things in them¬ 
selves used at that time to be objects of no little sport, — 
sport which took, of course, a rather heavy and German 
form, but which was very well warranted by the situation. 
The things in themselves of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, 
the sources of all our experience, but themselves never 
experienced, were too dim and distant to seem to a 
further reflection anything but chimeras. An epigram, 
usually attributed to Schiller, compared them to useless 
household furniture, once the pride of that very form of 
metaphysic which Kant’s “ Critique ” had undertaken to 
slay. For this old metaphysic had pretended to know 
them. Now that the pretentious doctrine is dead, what 
is the use of the abandoned furniture ? 

“ Da die Metaphysik vor Kurzem unbeerbt abging 
Werden die Dinge an sich morgen sub hasta verkauft.” 1 

But the house of our philosophy thus once emptied of 
cumbersome furniture, Fichte had found himself able to 

1 That is, freely translated : — 

“ Notice : The late metaphysic is dead without heirs, and to-morrow 
All the things in themselves shall under the hammer be sold.” 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 165 

fill it in his own fashion with the rarest treasures of truth. 
The real thing in itself, according to Fichte, is the active 
I, the Ego, the subject of self-consciousness. This each 
of us knows in his own person. To watch the activity of 
this great source of our being, to sound the depths of its 
endless nature, is to come to the true knowledge of God 
and of things which Spinoza already demanded for the 
wise man, and which Kant sought in vain in the external 
world. We and our world exist together. Our world is 
the expression of our character. As a man thinketh, so 
is he ; but with equal truth, according to Fichte, as a 
man is, so thinks he. He sees himself in all he sees. 
And this self that a man sees crystallized in all his 
world of sense, of society, and of philosophy, is simply his 
own fashion of conduct, his busy world-building tempera¬ 
ment. At the outset of life each personal self says, “ I 
must exist, I will exist.” But no one can exist unless he 
is ready to act. My life, my existence, is in work. I 
toil for self-consciousness, and without toil no conscious¬ 
ness. But once more, also, I can only work if I have a 
task, something foreign to me, a not-self to influence and 
finally to conquer. Therefore it is, thinks Fichte, that 
I stand from the beginning in the presence of a world 
which seems external. My deeper self unconsciously pro¬ 
duces this foreign world, and then bids me win my place 
therein. The material things yonder are therefore just 
the products of my unconscious activity. Their office it 
is to give me something to do; they are the outer embodi¬ 
ment of my duty; they are my moral law made manifest 
to sense. You and I see the same world about us merely 
because we, as moral beings, need and choose common 
tasks. And, in a deeper sense, the reason why you and 
I see the same world is that we are actually fragmentary 
manifestations of one infinite self, whose ultimate nature 
we can never fathom, but whose world is through and 
through a world of common tasks, — a world of a moral 
order, whereof we are all instruments. 


166 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


I. 

In the present lecture we have to follow the further 
story of German idealism as exemplified in the views and 
experiences of a number of persons who, for lack of a 
better name, are usually classed together as constituting 
the German Romantic School. The peculiar character of 
our undertaking in this course bids us attend as much as 
possible to the relations between philosophy and life. 
Where, as in the case of the German romantic school, a 
group of writers tried to embody a philosophy in a liter¬ 
ary movement, and to translate their own lives directly 
into philosophy, such a phenomenon cannot but be of 
great service to our purpose. And therefore I shall spend 
time upon matter that will indeed lack the technicality 
inseparable from even the most general account of Kant’s 
philosophy, but that will still have its bearing on our gen¬ 
eral task. In fact, my discussion will for the time leave 
the field of technical philosophy almost altogether, and 
for the rest of this lecture I shall speak of thoughts that 
will have their more metaphysical bearings shown only in 
later lectures. 

I mentioned in the last lecture how Fichte’s philosophy 
is an example of that beautiful waywardness which is 
everywhere characteristic of the Germany of the classical 
and romantic periods. For the rest, to particularize con¬ 
cerning this waywardness as it shows itself in Fichte, he 
is, after all, a very arbitrary thinker. His system has 
vast gaps in it. You in vain seek to get from Fichte, for 
instance, any precise deduction of how the world of our 
senses, down to its very details, is an embodiment of the 
moial law. We, in this age, whose world is so full of 
material facts, whose science has delved so deeply into 
physical nature, whose industrial art is so multiform in 
its inventions, whose whole view of man makes him so 
dependent for his health, his fortune, and his very reason, 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 


167 


upon physiological conditions, feel at once the great gulf 
that divides Fichte’s ethical idealism from the world of 
the natural order. We honor the stern enthusiasm of 
this idealist, but we find in his system the record of a dis¬ 
tinctly individual experience. That he has a hold upon 
a very genuine truth we ought to recognize; but we can¬ 
not read his fearless and often intolerant essays without 
becoming aware that it has not pleased God to create any 
perfectly orthodox Fichtean, save Fichte himself. Many 
of us will no doubt call ourselves, with Fichte, ethical 
idealists, since we indeed hold that the world is through 
and through a moral order; but his way of showing how 
it is a moral order will not content us. I, the active 
being, shall create this sense-world of mine unconsciously, 
for the sake of having my task, the material of my duty, 
made manifest to my senses. Very good, but why, then, 
do I create a world that has a belt of asteroids in it be¬ 
tween the orbits of Macs and Jupiter ? What portion of 
my personal and private duty do the comets, or the jelly¬ 
fishes, or the volcanoes, or the mosquitoes, make manifest 
to my senses ? What part has the Silurian period in the 
scheme of my moral order? And of what ethical value 
to me are the properties of the roots of algebraic equa¬ 
tions, or the asymptotes of an hyperbola? In the world 
of this moral order, you see, there is a great deal that will 
not easily submit to my ethical interpretation. But if we 
say, with Fichte, that the real world is after all not the 
world of just my private and individual moral order, but 
the world of God’s infinite ethical activity, so much the 
more is it incumbent upon us to be industrious in our 
efforts to comprehend the spirituality of the truths of na¬ 
ture by means of formulae that are more submissive to 
facts, more widely sensitive to the varied aspects of real¬ 
ity, less impatient of mystery, than were Fichte’s impetu¬ 
ous undertakings. If God’s world is through and through 
mor^J, jt is also through and through complicated, pro¬ 
found and physical. 


168 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Well, the story of the romantic school is the story of 
the enlargement of Fichte’s onesidedness through the ap¬ 
pearance, in the first place, of other not less arbitrary 
doctrines, which sought to interpret the whole world in 
terms of our spiritual interests, but which expressed other 
interests than those that he made central. And, for the 
rest, this story is also the tale of the gradual fixing of all 
such waywardness into the directions that have proved so 
fruitful in the recent decades of modern research. We 
are too frequently disposed to fancy that the philosophy 
of the period of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is something 
very remote from the philosophy of our own day. That 
philosophy, we say, was above all just wayward, fantastic, 
regardless of the limits of human knowledge, indifferent 
to science, unwisely imaginative. Nowadays we have 
changed all that, have abandoned romantic wanderings, 
have come to respect the facts of science, and to let the 
mysteries alone. But such a view of our relations to the 
age of the romantic school is not precisely historical; and 
wherein it is not precisely historical I want to make plain 
to you. Deeper than the contrast between that age and 
ours is, as we shall soon see, the relationship between the 
two. Our age, as we shall learn, contains merely what 
was implicit in the very waywardness of that revolution¬ 
ary period. Their youthful enthusiasms, at first vague, 
wandering, conflicting, took form at length through 
growth, and produced, in their maturity, our modern doc¬ 
trine of evolution, our modern efforts to bring into close 
relation the natural and the spiritual, our whole modern 
many-sidedness of interest and experience. The romantic 
period was the time of bloom and of flowers. Our period, 
if you will, is, in its matter-of-fact and apparently prosaic 
realism, the time of the ripened seeds, a time which the 
warm-hearted usually scorn as a bleak and autumnal pe¬ 
riod of dry seed-pods and chilly night airs. But the wise 
love such ages of ripening and of harvest; for they know 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 169 

that a richer growth is erelong to spring from all these 
barren - seeming seed-kernels of truth. But such meta¬ 
phors apart, what I want to insist upon is the essential 
unity of recent philosophy amidst all its transformations. 
Properly viewed, the lesson of the most fantastic specula¬ 
tions of the later German metapliysic is precisely the les¬ 
son which the thought of to-day is trying to express and 
to utilize. To understand the meaning of contemporary 
thought, say concerning evolution, apart from a compre¬ 
hension of the period from Kant to Hegel, is therefore, 
indeed, like trying to appreciate the mature and prosaic, 
but successful man, without some reference to the splendid 
dreams of his youth. We have never wholly broken with 
the romantic period. We have only grown older, and pos¬ 
sibly a little more saddened; but those earlier ideals live 
still in our breasts, only I should be glad if we were bet¬ 
ter aware of the fact than sometimes we are. 

Our immediate task in the coming lectures is thus two¬ 
fold. We want first to show how the romantic school, far 
outdoing the waywardness of Fichte, supplemented his 
one-sided interpretation of things by other, equally ideal¬ 
istic and much more fantastic, interpretations of reality. 
And, secondly, we want to show how our own more realis¬ 
tic age expresses, after all, not so much an abandonment of 
the true spirit of this idealistic period, as a fixation and a 
maturing of some of its deepest interests. 

And now, as to the romantic school itself, what, first of 
all, is the meaning of the word ? 


II. 

German literature, in its great modern outgrowth, be¬ 
gan, as you know, with Lessing’s early works, just after 
the middle of the eighteenth century, and ended with 
the death of its last prominent representative, Heine, in 
1856. But the principal productions of this century of 
literary activity belong to a very much briefer period. 


1T0 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

Lessing was a sort of forerunner of the classical age. 
Long as was Goethe’s literary life, his best years are those 
between 1770 and Schiller’s death in 1805. And to the 
credit of these thirty-five years may be reckoned much 
the larger half of the literary and a decidedly large frac¬ 
tion of the philosophical work of the whole great century 
of German mental life. Not only was this most produc¬ 
tive period decidedly brief, but the geographical limita¬ 
tions of the intenser literary interest, at any rate, in view 
of the fact that Germany had no natural literary capi¬ 
tal, are decidedly noteworthy. Two circles, the court at 
Weimar and the university a few miles distant at Jena, 
were, between 1775 and 1805, far and away the chief in¬ 
fluences in German literature and philosophy. At Wei¬ 
mar, Goethe and Schiller were for a time together. In 
Jena, Schiller himself taught for some years, while Fichte, 
Schelling, and Hegel all began their academic activity 
there. After 1800, indeed, Berlin became a centre sec¬ 
ond in importance only to Weimar, while the university 
at Jena sadly declined. But not until still later was in¬ 
tellectual activity of high rank observable all over Ger¬ 
many from Berlin to Heidelberg, and from Munich to the 
Rhine. However, as the streams spread they lost their 
swiftness, and erelong, for the intense life of the great 
years, there was substituted more and more of that fruit¬ 
ful but quiet industry of minute German scholarship, to 
which we all owe so much. 

The years from 1770 to 1805, and the circles of Wei¬ 
mar, of Jena, and, in a less degree, of Berlin, are there¬ 
fore central in importance in the history of German 
thought. But now, as must be pointed out, even here 
there are to be specially mentioned, as of most critical sig¬ 
nificance, ten years out of these thirty-five. They were 
the flower of the flower for German life. These were the 
last ten years of Schiller’s career, when his friendship 
with Goethe was most intimate, and when also, in addition 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 171 

to the great classical poets, a new generation of ambitious 
young men began to appear upon the scene. You must 
remember that, in 1800, Goethe was fifty-one and Schiller 
forty-one years old; and at such an age men who have 
become early famous are certain to find themselves sur¬ 
rounded by circles of eager and often envious youth, 
whose hearts have been set on fire by the example of the 
elder geniuses, and who themselves are minded to do even 
better than their betters. So it was with Goethe and 
Schiller. The young generation already swarmed all 
about them in Jena and in Weimar. It was a matter of 
course, in that day and region, that if you were young, 
and were anybody at all, you were a genius. The only 
question was what sort of a genius, in your lordly spiri¬ 
tual freedom, you had chosen to be. Four sorts of 
geniuses were especially popular, and all four sorts were 
as plenty as blackberries. There was the romancer of 
genius, who was plotting to outdo Wilhelm Meister. 
There was the dramatist of genius, who was disposed to 
banish Schiller’s plays into oblivion, so soon as he himself 
had learned his trade. There was the critic of genius, 
who had grasped the meaning and lesson of the literature 
of the ages, and who was especially fond of contrasting 
the Greek tragedy with Shakespeare, and of laying down 
poetical laws for all future time. And finally there was 
the philosopher of genius, whose business it was first of all 
to transcend Kant, and secondly to transcend everybody 
else. Best indeed was your lot in case you chose to 
exemplify in your person all four sorts of genius at once, 
as, for instance, the young Friedrich Schlegel for a while 
delighted to do. Your inner experiences were then sim¬ 
ply inimitable. In brief, “ Bliss was it in that dawn to 
be alive, but to be young was very heaven.” 

We may smile a little at all this ferment of ambitious 
hopes, but we can never be too grateful for what that 
brief period accomplished for us. It gave us philosophic 


172 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


cal ideas that, fragmentary though they were, will never 
be forgotten, and it produced some enduring poetry and 
romance, in addition to what Goethe and Schiller wrote, 
and of no small merit at that. Now from these circles of 
the younger geniuses, one especially stands out in inter¬ 
esting prominence. It is the circle which delighted to 
call itself the Romantic School. From its often crude 
efforts sprang a movement, the romantic movement in a 
wider sense, which lasted far on into our own century. 
It is this romantic movement in the wider sense that has 
proved the most characteristic outcome of modern German 
life as it was before 1848. To the romantic movement 
must be credited the whole wealth of German tales and 
songs that we love best after the greatest works of Goethe 
and of Schiller. The same general movement had its 
part in nourishing and in inspiring the music of modern 
Germany from Beethoven to Wagner. In brief, without 
this movement, German thought and German emotion 
would have no such meaning as they have for us to-day. 

But in the narrower sense, the name Romantic School 
was originally applied only to the little company of young 
men, all born somewhere between 1765 and 1775, of 
whom the most prominent were the two Schlegels, Augus¬ 
tus and his brother Friedrich, Ludwig Tieck, romancer 
and dramatist, Novalis (whose real name was Friedrich 
v. Hardenberg), the philosopher Schelling, and the theo¬ 
logian Schleiermsfbher. The Schlegels were the critics of 
the school, and were also men of considerable metaphysi¬ 
cal interest. Novalis, who died very young, touches, in 
his fragmentary remains, upon all the characteristic inter¬ 
ests of the romanticists; he is philosophical, poetical, crit¬ 
ical ; but he is everywhere and always the born dreamer. 
Schelling was intimately associated in a personal sense 
with all his fellow romanticists. If his intense meta¬ 
physical tastes kept him from attempting very seriously 
either dramas or romances, his early speculations bear 


THE EOMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 


173 


everywhere the mark of his friendships; they are the 
work of a restless and artistic soul, who loved the universe 
with a sort of tender passion, and whose philosophy is, 
even in its most technical subtleties, as much the confes¬ 
sion of a fiery heart as it is the outcome of a brilliant 
imagination and a wonderfully skillful wit. I have pre¬ 
ferred rather to discuss the philosophy of the romantic 
school under this name than to confine my title or my 
survey to Schelling, the representative philosopher of the 
little group, because it is here the movement that ex¬ 
presses itself in the man, not the man who masters the 
movement. Schelling was himself, always, even as phi¬ 
losopher, a creature of the moment. His moments were 
indeed often very great ones and might need each a whole 
volume to express itself. But Schelling is not, like Kant, 
a systematic and long - plotting thinker; nor yet, like 
Fichte, a man who, after many adventures, is completely 
overwhelmed and thenceforth possessed by a single idea. 
No, Schelling possesses directly the wavering passion of 
his romantic friends. His kaleidoscopic philosophy, 
which changed form with each new essay that he pub¬ 
lished, was like their whole scheme of life and of art. 
Trust your genius ; follow your noble heart; change your 
doctrine whenever your heart changes, and change your 
heart often. Such is the practical creed of the romanti¬ 
cists. The world, you see, is after all the world of the 
inner life. Kant cut us off from things in themselves ; 
Fichte showed us that it is the I, the self, that makes the 
world. Let us accept this lesson. The world is essen¬ 
tially what men of genius make it. Let us be men of 
genius, and make what we choose. We shall then be as 
gods, knowing good and evil. 

Herein, as you see, lies at once the great difference be¬ 
tween the romantic school and Fichte. Fichte had said : 
The world is the world as self-consciousness builds it; 
but the essence of self-consciousness is the moral will, the 


174 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

will to act dutifully, steadfastly, nobly, divinely; and 
therefore the world is duty solidified to our senses. The 
romantic spirit says from the very start: The world is 
indeed the world as self-consciousness builds it; but the 
true self is the self that men of genius, poets, construc¬ 
tive artists know; hence the real world is such as to sat¬ 
isfy the demands of the man of genius, the artist. Emo¬ 
tion, heart-experience, longings, divinations of the soul, 
are the best instruments for the philosopher. Dream out 
your world. It is after all but a dream of the inner life, 
this vast universe about us. The noblest dreamer will be 
the man to understand it the best. 

The distinguishing features of this group of young men 
were then, to sum up, so far, these: they proposed in 
common to create a new literary movement; and whilst 
they were rather speculative metaphysicians than true 
poets, they were nevertheless rather romancers than 
soberly constructive philosophers. They therefore suggest 
rather than complete. Their lesson is of more impor¬ 
tance to us than are their systems. At the start, that is, 
in the years about 1795, they were under the influence of 
Fichte, but his ethical idealism soon grew too stern for 
them. They interpreted the world rather in terms of sen¬ 
timent and of bold divination than in terms of the moral 
law. For the rest, external nature interested them, even 
in their most idealistic moods, more than it had interested 
Fichte. Of course, the external world is for them too 
only mind solidified, only a mass of ideas seen from with¬ 
out. But they are dissatisfied with Fichte’s moral law as 
a full account of the essence of this outer mirage of our 
senses. Art, they hold, is as suggestive as morality for 
the speculative thinker. Nature is therefore a work of 
unconscious art, a form which the great Genius of the 
world gives to his experiences. God is an artist, a poet, 
who pours out the wealth of his beautiful life in all the 
world of sense. Of this God, we too are embodiments; 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 175 

only we are not blind, as his other works are. We are 
conscious, and therefore it is that we see in sense-form, in 
nature, our own ideals crystallized. The more inner 
experiences we ourselves have, the more feelings, longings, 
ideas we possess, the more means we shall therefore have 
of interpreting nature. It is in vain, think these men, 
that you gather and heap up natural facts, if you have no 
heart. Only a poet can understand nature, for the true 
laws of nature are through and through analogous to the 
laws of the heart. If (so the romanticists would say), if 
we have ever been in love, then and then only we know 
why the plants grow towards the sunlight, or the free- 
swinging needles turn to the pole, or why the planets are 
loyal to the sun. If we are artistically complete in our 
inner natures, then we comprehend why the crystals love 
their regular forms. To understand the difference be¬ 
tween organic and inorganic matter, you have again to 
study first your own inner consciousness, and to examine 
its various stages, as they lead up from disorganized sen¬ 
sations to clear and organic reason. For the forms of 
matter in the outer world are symbolic, are precisely ana¬ 
logous, stage for stage, to these processes of the inner life. 
In brief, to study nature is to sympathize with nature, to 
trace the likenesses between the inner life and the mag¬ 
nets, the crystals, the solar systems, the living creatures, 
of the physical world. It is the part of genius to feel 
such sympathies with things; it is the part of philosophy 
to record your sympathies. Artists are often unconscious 
philosophers, but great philosophers, from this romantic 
point of view, are never more than consummate artists. 
Feeling is an indispensable guide to reason. We should 
never know God did we not share his nature in our emo¬ 
tions. He is only the many-sided and infinite genius. 
We appreciate him because we young romanticists are 
geniuses ourselves. 


176 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


III. 

Such philosophy as this was, of course, capable of innu¬ 
merable forms. Let us illustrate more in detail from the 
work of particular men: Best do they comprehend truth, 
declares in substance the young Friedrich Schlegel, best 
do they comprehend truth who have experienced the most 
moods. The truly philosophical attitude towards life and 
reality is therefore one of a sort of courageous fickle¬ 
ness. Schlegel himself called it the romantic irony, and 
endeavored to found a system upon it. This is his rather 
grotesque attempt to revive the Socratic method and doc¬ 
trine. Socrates had founded his whole life as a conversa¬ 
tional teacher, who never preached but always asked 
questions, upon a sort of ironical confession that he was 
not wise. “ This,” he used to affirm, “ is my only wis¬ 
dom, to know that I am an utterly ignorant man.” Well, 
somewhat so, but still with a difference, thinks Schlegel, 
the romantic genius confesses that marvelous as is his 
present divination of the truth of things, it is, after all, a 
quick divination, so to speak, which will away again ere¬ 
long, and will give place to some other theory, equally 
creditable to its clever possessor, equally true, but also 
equally fickle and therefore false. “The deepest truth 
known to me is that erelong my present truth will 
change : ” such, thinks Schlegel, is true wisdom. For 
the world, as you see, is the world for the self, for the 
inner life, for the heart. And the heart is so strong and 
lively a thing that it will change frequently. “The 
world exists for me; and to-morrow I propose to make a 
new world: ” such is Schlegel’s early interpretation of 
the essence of Fichte’s view. But alas, Fichte’s ethical 
idealism, with the moral law left out, is too grotesque in 
its mutilation to become a coherent doctrine. Friedrich 
Schlegel gave up this fickleness in later years, went over 
to the Catholic church, and devoted himself otherwise to 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 177 

Oriental studies, wherein he well earned a high and hon¬ 
orable rank. His stupendous poetical genius somehow 
never came to flower, much less to fruit, and remained 
therefore a secret close locked in his bosom. He assures 
us that he possessed it, and no doubt he knew, for in 
those days, as you are aware, the inner life knew every¬ 
thing. 

Novalis, our second illustration, is a more interesting 
character. His was a profound and noble nature, but 
fate forbade him to reach maturity. To his beautiful and 
baffling fragments the sensitive reader returns ever and 
anon afresh, perplexed, disappointed, and yet always de¬ 
lighted. Novalis never lived to finish anything. His 
philosophical fragments are after all, however, the best 
brief compend you could find of the essence of the roman¬ 
tic philosophy, in all its spiritual depth and in all its 
waywardness. For Friedrich Schlegel, in his metaphysi¬ 
cal capacity, as you have just seen, I cannot feel any 
serious respect. He was wayward and he was not deep. 
But Novalis every one who knows him truly must thor¬ 
oughly love. His childlike straightforwardness, his amia¬ 
ble plasticity, not to say innocent fickleness of character, 
his real strength of ideals withal, his sensitiveness to 
truth, even his very incapacity (so characteristic of his 
school) to do more than turn chance jewels of truth over 
and over and hold them up to the light — all these things 
fascinate us. He is not exactly a great thinker, but of 
his kind he is so charming. Novalis, or Friedrich von 
Hardenberg, was born in 1772, the second child of a large 
and very affectionate family. His childhood was sickly, 
and until he was nine years old, while he was the object 
of the kindest care, his mind seemed in no wise extraor¬ 
dinary. Then suddenly, after an acute affection, his 
health bettered, and he appeared to wake, “ as if from 
sleep,” as his biographer says. He was now a quick¬ 
witted, studious and imaginative boy, a great inventor 


178 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


and narrator of fantastic fairy tales, tender-hearted, genial, 
a lover of mystery. From 1790 to 1793 he attended sev¬ 
eral universities, was then nearly attracted into a soldier’s 
life by the excitement of the revolutionary period, but 
was erelong led into the hardly less exciting hopes and 
struggles of the new literary and philosophical movement, 
through an acquaintance with Friedrich Schlegel and 
with Fichte himself, who was then at the height of his 
earlier professional successes. In Arnstadt, in Thurin¬ 
gia, where Novalis went to learn a more practical profes¬ 
sion, in government service, he met and loved a very 
young girl, Sophie von Kuhn. Her eyes suggested to 
him the famous blaue Blume , which in his romance, 
“ Heinrich v. Ofterdingen,” he afterwards made the sym¬ 
bol of the romantic ideal itself, the mysterious wonder of 
magic that his hero sees in dream and thenceforth seeks. 
Readers of Heine’s book on the Romantic School will 
remember this Blue Flower. Sophie was not yet four¬ 
teen when Friedrich v. Hardenberg was betrothed to her. 
They were never married; and three years later she died, 
after a long illness, constantly watched to the end by her 
devoted lover, to whom by this time the worship of his 
love had become a religion. Her death was the turning- 
point of his brief career. His mourning for her took a 
form worthy of a romantic philosopher. He dated a new 
sacred era from the day of her death, and kept a diary 
in accordance with his thus established chronology. The 
diary, which is unfortunately somewhat brief, is devoted 
to meditations intended to prepare him to meet her in 
the life beyond. And as for this meeting, he decides to 
bring it about in a way which shall express and conform 
his ardent faith in Fichtean principles. Fichte, namely, 
has said that our will is the master of the universe. 
Well, to be sure, suicide, in the ordinary sense, is not the 
philosopher’s way to the other world ; but may not one by 
sheer force of will so purify himself as to become spirit- 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 


179 


ually fit to live in the higher life, and thereupon, not in¬ 
deed by any mere fading away, but by one supreme Ent- 
schluss , one resolution, made for and by his deeper self, 
simply transfer himself, in a single glorious moment, to 
the realm of free spirits? Friedrich persuades himself 
that this is possible, and decides to give himself just one 
year to prepare his soul for the final act of faith. He 
will not go to her in weakness, nor through the door of 
illness or of violence. In the full glow of health, in the 
ecstasy of a pure love, he will make himself ready, and 
then he will pass over in one instant to Sophie’s side. 
You may be reminded here of the lover in a song which 
Schubert’s music has rendered so familiar and tear-com- 
pelling. I mean the little romanza called “ Rosamunde; ” 
save, indeed, that das Ende vom Lied , in case of Novalis, 
is somewhat different. During this time of mourning he 
planned his wonderful Hymns to the Night, very brief 
and mystical rhapsodies in Ossianic prose, interspersed 
with verse. His diary, however, soon complains that it is 
a little hard to be quite healthy and still to remain wholly 
unworldly. One has so many temptations to forgetful¬ 
ness of lofty ideals. One is, after all, but twenty-six; 
one loves discussion, friends, philosophy ; one plainly has 
even a good appetite; and alas ! this world is so fair, 
this age in which one lives is so inspiring! Nay, one is 
not yet quite worthy of the world of free spirits, nor of 
Sophie. So the days go by; and when the year of the 
preparation for the great Entschluss is done, not Novalis, 
but Sophie has passed — this time not merely into the 
world of spirits, but even into the realm of the pure Pla¬ 
tonic Ideas themselves. Novalis still worships her glori¬ 
fied essence, but as for his noble Fichtean self, it continues 
to surround itself with the sense-facts of the terrestrial 
order, and now perceives its duty made manifest to its 
eyes in the person of one Julie Charpentier; for to her 
Novalis is by this time betrothed after the fashion of the 
visible world. 


180 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


I assure you that I do not repeat this very well-known 
and even rather famous story here either in any spirit of 
scoffing, or for the sake of a digression. I can far better 
suggest the inner sense and the essence of this whole ro¬ 
mantic idealism, in all its beauty and its waywardness, 
by such a tale as this of the love of Novalis than by a 
much longer homily. Here, you see, is the romantic in¬ 
terpretation of Fichte’s doctrine. You see the spirituality, 
the tenderness, the perfectly honest sentiment of it all; 
and you also see the essential fickleness, the inevitable 
arbitrariness, of an idealism that has not yet found any 
truly objective standards. In a less gentle soul than No¬ 
valis this arbitrariness would become cynical. Such noble 
sentiments have, you see, their even ghastly dangers. Is 
it feeling that guides you in your interpretation of the 
world ? Are your ideas simply plastic ? Do you make 
your world solely through your own mind ? Alas! as 
Hegel afterwards said, feeling is the mere soil of the 
forest of life; and from the same soil the noblest tree or 
the hatefulest weed may spring. Suppose the resolution 
of Novalis had been by chance not only less fickle, but 
also less noble ; might not his subjective idealism have 
justified equally well a fierce rebellion against all that 
humanity justly holds dearest, instead of a mere indiffer¬ 
ence to what common sense calls obvious ? In the later 
history of the romantic movement the fickleness of way¬ 
ward idealism did indeed work itself out to the extreme 
of its painful dialectics, and if you want to know the re¬ 
sults, Amadeus Hoffmann’s tales of horror, or our own 
Edgar Poe’s gloom, will tell you enough of the story to 
let you see one of its endings. The Nihilism and the 
Pessimism of more recent days will give you another out¬ 
come of that arbitrary idealism which knows no law. 
And the lightning of Heine’s scorn will show you yet 
further glimpses of the same lurid world in a fashion that 
will leave you undecided whether to laugh or to weep. 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 


181 


And yet, all this must not discourage true idealism, and 
does not discourage it. What I mean is just what I have 
already repeatedly pointed out: That as arbitrariness in 
our interpretation of things is the curse of immature ideal¬ 
ism, mature idealism will certainly find out how to return 
to an order as fixed and as supreme as was Spinoza’s sub¬ 
stance. 

IV. 

Schelling, finally, the prince of the romanticists, is an 
interesting example of a growth of spirit whereby a great 
thinker was indeed led from Fichte back to Spinoza. 
Only to the end, while Schelling became the firmest of 
believers in a supreme and substantial order of things, 
which impresses itself upon our reason from above, and 
which we are all forced to obey and to accept, his method 
remains wayward, imaginative, and, with all his genius, 
immature. His Spinozism is such as Spinoza could never 
have pretended to comprehend ; his idealism early became 
such as to excite first the suspicion, and finally the vio¬ 
lent condemnation of Fichte ; and his whole work is such 
as only a great genius could have begun, and only a 
romanticist could have left in the chaos wherein, after 
a very long life, he finally left it. 

Even our brief glance at Schelling’s character must 
take into account the remarkable woman whose counsel 
and affection made a great part of his most productive 
years possible. I doubt whether Schelling, even as phi¬ 
losopher, can be well understood apart from Caroline. 
She herself was the idol of the whole romantic circle. 
Her maiden name was Michaelis ; she was twelve years 
the senior of Schelling. When Schelling first met her, 
himself then early in his twenties, she was already married 
a second time, and to Augustus Schlegel. Her daughter 
by her first marriage, Auguste Bohmer, died in 1800, 
aged seventeen. As Schlegel, during the closing years of 
the century, lived in Berlin, and Caroline in Jena, their 


182 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

marriage, although friendly, was not precisely the first 
interest of either member of the wedded pair. The ro¬ 
mantic school, with philosophical consistency, believed in 
applying their principle of waywardness to marriage also, 
and approved of elective affinities ; and accordingly, abso¬ 
lutely without an unkind word, the marriage of the Sclile- 
gels was ultimately dissolved by means of a decree of the 
obliging Duke at Weimar, and Schelling married Caro¬ 
line in 1808, after several years of friendship and corre¬ 
spondence. Schelling and Caroline remained on the best 
terms with Augustus Schlegel until Caroline’s death in 
1809. 

Caroline’s letters to Schelling, between 1799 and 1808, 
are certainly much more than interesting. The wonderful 
charm of this herrliche Frau is once for all an irresisti¬ 
ble sensation as you read her intimate self-confessions. 
She is a marvelous compound of the pathetic, the roguish, 
the wise, the gay, the deeply sad, and the singularly 
thoughtful. She has seen, felt, suffered, struggled ; and 
she has conquered. She loves power intensely, is a very 
good hater, and yet, she has also a childlike and playful 
gentleness that fairly disarms you. When she is deep in 
trouble, a light or perhaps a bitter laugh is never far 
away, wherewith she wins again her composure. She is, 
in her romantic fashion, as high-minded as she is abso¬ 
lutely fearless, — a sort of Penthesilea, only vastly more 
tender, and with the heart of a bereaved mother, as well 
as with the temper of a trained warrior. To her husband 
Schlegel, in Berlin, she writes meanwhile as straightfor¬ 
wardly and lengthily as you please; only to him she has 
more to say about literary matters. Philosophy she 
thought of often, and with just the easy swift insight 
into subtleties which must have enlightened the young 
Schelling more than once. Only system-making she re¬ 
garded with indifference. Hence it was, in part, for her 
admiration that Schelling must have thought out his 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 


183 


subtle, but unsystematic fragments of philosophic creation. 
They frequently discussed such matters together. Once 
in conversation, as she writes in 1801 to her husband 
Schlegel, she and Schelling fell to inventing an appro¬ 
priate motto in verse for Fichte (the “ Sun-clear,” as she 
calls him, after the title of one of his essays, the “ Sun- 
clear Exposition of the Essence of Recent Philosophy ”), 
whose solemn and devout appeals to his readers to be 
honorable men for once, and agree with him, were then 
growing rather wearisome. They hit upon Hamlet’s — 

“ Doubt that the stars are fire, 

Doubt that the planets move.” 

That had an idealistic sound, and seemed to begin a fit¬ 
ting motto for Fichte. They took these lines, of course, 
in the current German translation, and then Caroline’s 
wit wrought out this as the whole motto : — 

“ Zweifle an der Sonne Klarheit, 

Zweifle an der Sterne Licht, 

Leser, nur an meiner Wahrheit 
Und an deiner Dummheit nicht.” 

I venture, with hesitation, to imitate Caroline in Eng¬ 
lish, but at a long distance, thus : — 

“ Doubt that the stars are fire, 

Doubt all the things of sense, 

But, reader, doubt not I am wise, 

And thy poor wits are dense.” 

But Caroline had not only the power to criticise Fichte 
in this fashion ; she knew also how to write an excellent 
contrast between Fichte’s genius and Schelling’s, as fol¬ 
lows, in a letter to her young friend himself, who did not 
marry her until two years later: “ It is growing more and 
more needful now that you produce something eternal, 
without making so much ado about it. Surely, my dear¬ 
est friend, you are n’t asking my opinion about Fichte’s 
power, although you seem to come near it. I have always 
felt that, with all his incomparable skill in thinking, he 


184 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


has his limits ; only, as I have thought, the reason is that 
he fails of the divine instinct that you possess ; and if 
you have broken through his charmed circle, then I feel 
as if it was not so much because you are a philosopher, 
but because you have poetry in you, while he has none. 
I suppose I use the word 4 philosopher ’ wrongly. If I do, 
laugh at me. But it is poetical inspiration that has led 
you to production, as it is simply sharpness of seeing that 
has led him to consciousness. He has the bright light, 
but you have the glowing fire; his gift can illuminate, 
only yours can produce. There, have n’t I put that right 
neatly ? As if one should see an immeasurable landscape 
through a keyhole.” 

You will now indeed be anxious to learn something of 
how Schelling had broken through Fichte’s charmed cir¬ 
cle. Well, his most technical thought will be mentioned 
next time, when I compare him with Hegel, in whose 
company he worked for a brief, but important period. 
For this most significant deed of Schelling’s can only be 
understood in his relations with Hegel. Of Schelling, the 
poetical friend of Caroline, and the brilliant young crea¬ 
tor of the so-called Naturphilosophie , I have yet to say 
a word to-day. The most fruitful problem of Fichte’s 
system was, of course, the problem of the relation of my 
conscious self to my deeper self, of my private thought 
to the universal and divine thought, whereof I am the 
transient expression. Now, it early occurred to Schelling 
that Fichte had not made all that he could of this rela¬ 
tion between the humanly conscious and the divine Ego. 
My external world, says Fichte, is the product of my own 
unconscious act; and this act, unconscious to me, is 
ultimately an expression of God’s eternal activity itself. 
Well, then, is not the true idealism this? The outer 
world of sense has no existence except as a manifestation 
of the spirit. And there is but one spirit, after all; but 
this spirit extends far beyond my little self. He is the 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 185 

spirit of nature. You cannot comprehend him if you 
look only within. In you he is indeed the same that he 
is yonder in nature, only in nature his will is writ large, 
in dead and in living forces, in gravitation, in magnetism, 
in electricity, in vitality. Study these things, not as if 
they were ever utterly dead things in themselves, but as 
being other expressions of precisely the same life that is 
writ fine in your consciousness. Thus, by reversing, as 
it were, the Fichtean telescope, you see the human sub¬ 
ject indeed as the central being of the human world, only 
in himself he now appears less imposing. Turning, how¬ 
ever, the right end of the glass towards nature, you see 
therein the life of humanity typified, symbolized, crystal¬ 
lized, as it were; for spirit comes to itself in man only 
because it has first expressed itself in nature, and is now 
striving in us to become conscious of its own work. Thus 
viewed, man is indeed simply an evolution from nature ; 
and Schelling indeed holds that a theory of the evolution 
of consciousness is needed as a complement to Fichte’s 
theory. “In autumn, 1798, I entered upon my lectures 
at Jena,” says Schelling himself, in one of his autobio¬ 
graphical statements, “ full of the thought that the way 
from nature to spirit must be as possible as the reverse 
way, upon which Fichte had entered.” Here, then, is 
Schelling’s epoch-making idea, and you will see hereafter 
that it is the idea which modern philosophic thought will 
henceforth be seeking to define. To complete the under¬ 
taking of idealism, you need a theory of the facts of 
nature, so interpreted as to be in harmony with the view 
that only ideas are the realities, and yet so adapted to 
experience as to free your idealism from the arbitrariness 
of the inner life of mere finite selves. Can we, then, 
prove that the very spirit whose life our own conscious* 
ness expresses is already present outside and beyond us, 
weaving the web of the external world, giving it sub¬ 
stance, and yet preserving its ideality and its harmony 


186 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


with our inner life? If we can, then, our doctrine will 
become what is technically called objective idealism. 
The outer world is, then, God’s thought shown to our 
eyes ; the inner world is God’s thought become conscious 
of itself. This doctrine was the centre of Schelling’s 
Naturphilosophie. Unfortunately he was no man to 
prove such a theory. He could only suggest, develop 
imaginatively, and in later essays treat with a marvelous, 
but fragmentary technical skill. As poet, he indeed 
broke through Fichte’s charmed circle ; but as poet, he 
never stated the essence of his Naturphilosophie more 
clearly or more boldly than he did in a poetic fragment 
written under the eyes of Caroline, and meant largely for 
her approval. Of this production he himself never pub¬ 
lished more than a brief portion ; in later years it has 
been printed from his papers. I refer to his whimsically 
so-called Epikurisch Glaubensbekenntniss Heinz Wider- 
porstens , “ Epicurean Confession of Faith of Hans Bris- 
tleback.” 

In this thoroughly wayward sketch in verse, Schelling 
assumes a grotesque name and character, in order to give 
himself greater freedom to express the heart of his 
Naturphilosophie in the boldest and most pantheistic 
terms. The meter is borrowed from the well-known re¬ 
vival, in Goethe’s “ Faust,” of the old Knittelvers , or 
free rhyme of early German poetry. Schelling’s hero, 
in whose character he speaks, is supposed to be trying to 
play the irreligious materialist, whom the priests have 
been driving to despair, and who at last rebels. Nature 
is his religion, he says. He loves good cheer and fair 
faces, and he hates superstition. Is n’t this world of the 
senses after all the genuine thing ? Heinz grows fairly 
rollicking in his materialistic and epicurean speeches. 
Suddenly, without warning, he assumes another tone, 
From beneath the mask of the epicurean, the voice of the 
romantic mystic sounds. Why, then, is this world of 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 


187 


the senses the world for the truly wise man ? Because it 
is but the embodiment of one eternal and divine spirit. 
Then follows a Schellingian sketch of a process of evo¬ 
lution which, proceeding through the animals, culminates 
in us. The world of nature is thus full of the struggle 
of the great spirit to win his own higher life. The end 
and crown of this whole process is man. In him, blind 
nature gets a voice ; in him the spirit comes to himself. 
And all the universe is one glorious life, in whose con¬ 
templation the mystic soul rejoices. 

Let me give you, as a close, my own hasty rendering of 
some of Schelling’s curious lines, with a certain effort to 
preserve the unequal metre and even the very unequal 
worth of the original. The Knittelvers , at its noblest, is 
only a sort of glorified doggerel, and is never easy to man¬ 
age in translation ; but I must suggest to you a little of 
the romantic intoxication of this sort of pantheism, so 
characteristic of one great tendency in German thought. 

After his introductory denunciation of priestcraft, asce¬ 
ticism, and superstition, the gay Heinz is made to run on 
thus, speaking of course in character : — 

" Therefore religion I forsake, 

All superstitious ties I break, 

No church will I visit to hear them preach, 

I have done with all that the parsons teach. 

And yet there is one faith that masters my will, 

Glows in my verse, and inspires me still, 

Daily my heart with delight doth thrill, 

Eternally showing 

New form ; till I knowing, 

This faith so clear, 

This light so near, 

This poem undying, 

Must witness its truth beyond denying; 

So that I can nothing hold nor conceive 
Save what it counsels me to believe ; 

Nor aught as certain or right maintain, 

Save what it reveals to my eyes so plain. 


188 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Thus, then, in my heart am I freed from fear, 
Sound in body and soul stand here, 

And may, instead of posture and prayer, 

Instead of losing my way in the air, 

Here on the earth, in her blue eyes see 
The deepest depths that exist for me. 

Nay, and why should I in the world suffer dread, 
I, who know the world from the foot to the head ? 
’T is a tame creature, is it not ? 

When has it ever its bonds forgot ? 

Yields to the yoke of all-ruling law, 

Crouches at my feet in awe. 

Within it a giant spirit doth dream, 

But his soul is a frozen lava stream ; 1 
From his narrow house he cannot away, 

Nor his iron chains escape for a day. 

Yet often he flutters his wings in his sleep, 
Mightily stirs in his dungeon-keep, 

Travails in dead and in living things 
To know his will and to free his wings. 2 

His power, that fills the veins with ore, 

And renews in the spring the buds once more, 
Labors unceasing in darkness and night, 

In all nature’s nooks and crannies for light, 

Fears no pang in its fierce desire 

To live and to conquer and win its way higher. 

Organs and members it fashions anew, 

Lengthens or shortens, makes many or few, 

And wrestles and writhes in its search till it find 
The form that is worthiest of its mind. 

Struggling thus on life intent, 

Against a cruel environment, 

It triumphs at last, in one narrow space, 

And comes to itself in a dwarfish race, 

That, fair of form, of stature erect, 

Stands on earth as the giant’s elect, 

1 “ Steckt zwar ein Riesengeist darinnen, 

1st aber versteinert mit seinen Sinnen.” 

2 “ In todten und lebendigen Dingen 

Thut naeh Bewusstseyn machtig ringen.” 


THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 


189 


Is called in our speech the son of man, 

Outcome and crown of the spirit’s plan. 

From iron slumber, from dreaming set free, 

Now marvels the spirit who he may be. 

Looks on himself with wondering gaze, 

Measures his limbs in dim amaze, 

Longs in terror once more to be hid 
In nature’s slumber, of sentience rid. 

But nay, his freedom is won for aye, 

No more in nature’s peace may he lie ; 

In the vast dark world that is all his own, 

He wanders his life’s narrow path alone. 

Yes, he even fears, in his visions dim, 

That the giant himself may be wroth with him, 

And like Saturn of old, in godlike scorn, 

Devour his children scarcely born ; 

Know not that he himself is the Sprite 

That longingly toiled in the world’s dark night ; 

Peoples the void with the ghosts of his fear, 

Yet could he say, the Giant’s peer : — 

I am the God who nature’s bosom fills, 

I am the life that in her heart’s blood thrills. 1 
From the first quiver of her mystic power, 

Until of life there came that primal hour, 

When force new form and body power assumed, 

And flowers the beauty showed that lay entombed, —* 
Yes, now, wherever light, as dawn begins, 

A new created world from chaos wins, — 

And in the thousand eyes that, from the sky, 

Show night and day the heavenly mystery, — 
Onwards, to where, in thought’s eternal truth 
Nature’s deep self rewords itself in truth, — 

There stirs one might, one pulse-beat all sufficing, 

All power retaining, aye, — and sacrificing.” 

1 “ Ich bin der Gott der sie im Busen tragt, 

Der Geist der sich in allem bewegt.” 


LECTUKE VII. 


HEGEL. 

Concekning Hegel, wlio forms our special topic in this 
lecture, it is extraordinarily difficult to get or to give any 
general impressions that will not be seriously misleading. 
I undertake my task, therefore, with a very strong impres¬ 
sion of its importance and its difficulty. The outcome of 
what we have thus far discussed in these lectures is briefly 
this; Modern thought began with an endeavor to find a 
true and rational doctrine about the real outer universe, 
and to state this doctrine in clear and even mathematical 
form. The rediscovery of the importance of the inner 
life led, however, during the eighteenth century, to a 
skeptical scrutiny of the powers of the human reason it¬ 
self, and the magnificent systems of earlier thinkers ap¬ 
peared, when examined in the light of such scrutiny, 
dogmatic and uncertain. Thought endeavored, neverthe¬ 
less, to re-win its great assurances in a new form. Truth, 
said Idealism, is essentially an affair of the inner life. 
The world of truth is the world as it would appear to a 
complete and fully self-conscious self. The outer uni¬ 
verse is only a show world. Its reality is only practical. 
It is essentially a mirage of the inner life. The real 
universe is the universe of the spirit. Our deepest rela¬ 
tion is not to the natural order at all, but to the one true 
self, namely, God’s own life. 

Such, as we found, was the position reached alike by 
Fichte and the romanticists. But in their further thought 
they diverged. For Fichte, the centre of the universe, as 


HEGEL. 


191 


his idealism conceives it, is the moral law. The infinite 
self longs for rational and active self-possession. Hence 
it differentiates itself into numerous forms, as the vine 
grows out into its own branches. These branchings of 
the one great vine of the spirit form our finite and essen¬ 
tially incomplete selves. 

But for the romanticists, as we found, the centre of the 
world is not so much the moral law as the interest which 
every spirit has in a certain divine wealth of emotion and 
of experience. The world is the world of ideas; things 
exist because spirits experience them; and spirits experi¬ 
ence because, as parts of the divinely complete life, it is 
their interest to be as manifold and wealthy in their self- 
realization as possible. 

I. 

Before we now pass directly to Hegel it is necessary 
to say yet a word of the more technical speculations of 
Sclielling, of whom, in his character as romanticist, we 
heard something in the last lecture. Schelling’s develop¬ 
ment, as you already know, was very rapid ; his writings 
were early voluminous. He was a man of mark and a 
professor at Jena by the time he had reached his twenty- 
third year. His systematic views during his youthful pe¬ 
riod seemed to his readers to alter with a dangerously 
magical ease and swiftness of transformation. He him¬ 
self meanwhile denied, during the years up to 1809, that 
there was so far any significant change from the essential 
doctrines of his early works. He had added, he said, to 
what he at first taught. More truth had come to him; 
not a contradiction of former insight. But readers found 
it suspicious that each new book of Schelling’s seemed to 
supersede all his previous efforts. In 1797, he published 
his “Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature.” During 
the next three years appeared his “ System of Transcen¬ 
dental Idealism ” and his “ First Sketch of a System of. 
the Philosophy of Nature.” These two latter works were 


192 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


to be a first statement, so their author declared, of the 
two great and seemingly opposed aspects of philosophy. 
The outer world was to be shown as after all the mani¬ 
festation of spirit; the inner world of the self was to be 
exhibited as inevitably expressing itself in relation to an 
outer, a natural order. The fundamental thought of the 
whole doctrine was in substance this: Fichte had declared 
that it is the self-assertion of the absolute self, the free 
choice of the true Ego, that is the source of all truth. 
When I as knower recognize a truth, that is because I as 
doer have first made this truth. This view Schelling also 
accepts. But now, as one sees, a conscious self is at once 
the doer of its present act, and the contemplator of the 
results of its past acts. As I look out on the world of 
nature, I see crystallized before me the expression of what 
my true and absolute self has already been doing. The 
same activity that this present consciousness exemplifies 
for me has been there from eternity, and nature is the 
concrete embodiment to the onlooker of the results of his 
own eternal deeds. Nature then is not merely, as Fichte 
had said, my duty made manifest to my senses; it is also 
my timelessly past spiritual life, — not of course my finite 
or individual and private past life, but the life of my 
deeper self, of the one and absolute divine spirit. This 
autobiography of spirit, manifest to our eyes, is then the 
natural order. On the other hand, the inner life as such 
is capable of a philosophical treatment; for this is, as it 
were, not the record of the spirit’s past, but the fullness 
of the spirit’s conscious actuality. We have thus a two¬ 
fold philosophy to be wrought out, and Schelling in 1799 
and 1800 publishes his two sketches as though in topic, 
if not in execution, they completely covered the ground. 
But in 1801 appeared a new treatise, called by Schelling 
simply “Exposition of my System of Philosophy,” and 
here the doctrine seems to take a new form, which readers 
could only with great difficulty reconcile with what had 


HEGEL. 


193 


gone before. As during the winter of 1800-1801 Schel- 
ling expounded this system in lectures, before publishing 
the treatise, hearers asserted, as Schelling himself says, 
that he had wholly changed his doctrine. On the con¬ 
trary, says Schelling, in his preface to the new book, this 
is the system that I have held all along, and have merely 
been keeping to myself so far, because it was too deep a 
thing to expound before the time came. The system in 
question was called by its author the Identitats-System. 
Deeper than both nature and spirit is now something that 
Schelling calls by various mysterious names, the “ Abso¬ 
lute,” the “ Identity,” the “ Indifference of Subject and 
Object,” the “ Unity of Nature and Spirit.” It is a curi¬ 
ous metaphysical product, this new principle. It resem¬ 
bles Spinoza’s Substance; it pretends to be loftier than 
Fichte’s Divine Self. It is something even dimmer and 
vaguer than the Giant Spirit of Nature, of whom Schel- 
ling’s verses told us in the last lecture. Hegel, a few 
years later, rudely called this Schellingian “ Identity,” 
this “ Absolute,” in whose indescribable nature all truth 
was to be somehow hidden, “ the infinite night in which 
all cows are black.” Its nature was the kind of thing 
you think of when you think of nothing in particular. 
Yet this nature of the absolute was to be the deepest of 
all truth, deeper than the self, deeper than outer nature, 
deeper than anything ever before known in philosophy. 

I am not minded to trouble you here with a fuller ac¬ 
count of Schelling’s Identitats-System, whose exposition, 
as it chances, is really very deep and suggestive, with 
all its vagueness. The thought’ that there must after all 
be some sort of synthesis possible of Kant and Spi¬ 
noza, was indeed an important thought. And historically 
the Identitats-System has a very significant relation to 
Hegel’s thinking. For Schelling wrote this new treatise 
under the direct influence of his intercourse with Hegel, 
who had then appeared at Jena, where Schelling was 


194 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

teaching. What Hegel maintained, and early impressed 
upon Schelling, was that an end must be put, if possible, 
to the romantic vagueness of all this dreaming about the 
relations of the individual and the absolute self, and about 
the conceptions of the finite and the infinite in general. 
What philosophy needed was a more exact analysis and 
proof of the assertion that the individual consciousness 
and the outer order, the finite self and the infinite self, 
the world of the moment and the world of the universal, 
are linked in close spiritual ties. Philosophy must be¬ 
come a system, or else remain naught. This thought 
Schelling found present in Hegel’s mind, and so Schelling 
for the moment forced his poetical speculations to assume 
a Spinozistic garb. Largely ineffective, however, Schel- 
ling’s best efforts remained thenceforth. We shall do 
well, therefore, to turn at once to the more successful sys- 
tematizer of the idealistic scheme, namely, Hegel. 


n. 

With the idealists of the romantic school Hegel had, 
indeed, many things in common, but he differed from 
them profoundly in temperament. They had reached 
their absolute self by various mystical or otherwise too 
facile methods, which we need not further expound. 
Hegel hated easy roads in philosophy, and abhorred mys¬ 
ticism. He therefore, at first, in his private studies, had 
clung closely to Kant’s original mode of dealing with the 
problems of the new philosophy until he had found his 
own fashion of reflection. To understand what this fash¬ 
ion was we must turn to the man himself. 

Yet, as I now come to speak of Hegel’s temperament, 
I must at once point out that of all first-class thinkers he 
is, indeed, personally, one of the least imposing in charac¬ 
ter and life. 1 Kant was a man whose intellectual might 

1 The expert reader will easily detect the influence of Haym and 
of Dr. Hutchinson Stirling’s estimates of Hegel’s personality in what 


HEGEL. 


195 


and heroic moral elevation stood in a contrast to the 
weakness of his bodily presence, which, after all, had 
something of the sublime about it. Spinoza’s lonely, 
almost princely, haughtiness of intellect joins with his 
religious mysticism to give his form grace, and his very 
isolation nobility. But Hegel is in no wise either graceful 
or heroic in bearing. His dignity is solely the dignity of 
his work. Apart from his achievement, and his tempera¬ 
ment as making it possible, there is extremely little of 
mark in the man. The wonder of him lies in his profes¬ 
sional, not in his human aspect. He was a keen-witted 
Suabian, a born scholar, a successful teacher, self-pos¬ 
sessed, decidedly crafty, merciless to his enemies, quarrel¬ 
some on occasion after the rather crude fashion of the 
German scholar, sedate and methodical in the rest of his 
official life; a rather sharp disciplinarian when he had to 
deal with young people or with subordinates ; a trifle ser¬ 
vile when he had to deal with official or with social supe¬ 
riors. From his biographer, Rosenkranz, we learn of him 
in many private capacities; he interests us in hardly any 
of them. He was no patriot, like Fichte ; no romantic 
dreamer, like Novalis; no poetic seer of splendid meta¬ 
physical visions, like Schelling. His career is absolutely 
devoid of romance. We even have one or two of his love- 
letters. They are awkward and dreary beyond measure. 
His inner life either had no crises, or concealed them 
obstinately. In his dealings with his friends, as, for 
instance, with Schelling, he was wily and masterful, using 
men for his advantage so long as he needed them, and 
turning upon them without scruple when they could no 
longer serve his ends. His life, in its official character, 
was indeed blameless. He was a faithful servant of his 

follows. The reader who desires a more eulogistic account will find 
such, and from a high authority too, in Professor Edward Caird’s 
discussion of Hegel in the volume on that thinker in Blackwood’s 
Philosophical Classics. 


196 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


various successive masters, and unquestionably he reaped 
his worldly reward. His students flattered him, and 
therefore he treated them well; but towards opponents 
he showed scant courtesy. To the end he remains a self- 
seeking, determined, laborious, critical, unaffectionate 
man, faithful to his office and to his household, loyal to 
his employers, cruel to his foes. In controversy he spared 
not persons any more than doctrines. His style in his pub¬ 
lished books is not without its deep ingenuity and its mar¬ 
velous accuracy, but otherwise is notoriously one of the 
most barbarous, technical, and obscure in the whole his¬ 
tory of philosophy. If his lectures are more easy-flowing 
and genial, they are in the end, and as a whole, hardly 
more comprehensible. He does little to attract his reader, 
and everything to make the road long and painful to the 
student. All this is not awkwardness; it is deliberate 
choice. He is proud of his barbarism. And yet — here 
is the miracle — this unattractive and unheroic person 
is one of the most noteworthy of all the chosen instru¬ 
ments through which, in our times, the spirit has spoken. 
It is not ours to comprehend this wind that bloweth 
where it listeth. We have only to hear the sound thereof. 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in August, 
1770, at Stuttgart. His family was of a representative 
Suabian type ; his own early surroundings were favorable 
to an industrious, but highly pedantic sort of learning. 
At the gymnasium in Stuttgart, which he attended from 
his seventh year, he was an extraordinarily, but, on the 
whole, a very healthily studious boy. From his fifteenth 
until well on in his seventeenth year, we find him keeping 
a diary, from which Rosenkranz has published large frag¬ 
ments. It is in strong contrast to the sentimental diaries 
that the characteristic youth of genius, in those days, 
might be expected to keep. In fact there was no promise 
of genius, so far, in the young Hegel. His diary runs on 
much after this fashion: “Tuesday, June 28 (1785), I 


HEGEL. 


197 


observed to-day what different impressions the same thing 
can make on different people. ... I was eating cherries 
with excellent appetite, and having a very good time, . . . 
when somebody else, older than I, to be sure, looked on 
with indifference, and said that in youth one thinks that 
one cannot possibly pass a cherry-woman without having 
one’s mouth water for the cherries (as we Suabians say), 
whereas, in more advanced years one can let a whole 
spring pass without feeling an equal longing for such 
things. Whereupon I thought out the following princi¬ 
ple, a rather painful one for me, but still a very profound 
one, namely, that in youth . . . one can’t eat as much as 
one wants, while in age one does n’t want to eat as much 
as one can.” 

Such was the philosopher Hegel, at fifteen years of age. 
His diary never records a genuine event. Nothing seems 
to have happened to this young devourer of cherries and 
learning, except such marvels as that one day at church 
he learned the date of the Augsburg Confession; or that, 
during a walk, one of his teachers told him how every 
good thing has its bad side; and again, during another 
walk, tried to explain to him why July and August are 
hotter than June. Of such matters the diary is full,— 
never does one learn of an inner experience of any signifi¬ 
cance. Aspirations are banished. The boy is pedantic 
enough, not to say out and out a prig; but this at any 
rate appears as the distinctive feature of his tempera¬ 
ment : he is thoroughly objective. He wants to know life 
as it is in itself, not as it is for him ; he desires the true 
principles of things, not his private and sentimental inter¬ 
pretation of them. Meanwhile, he is at once well in¬ 
structed in religious faith, and given so far to the then 
popular and rather shallow rationalism which loved to 
make very easy work of the mysterious of every kind and 
grade. He devotes some space to the explanation of 
ghost stories. He even records, meanwhile, occasional 


198 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


bits of dry Suabian humor, such as later, in a much 
improved form, found place in his academic lectures, and 
were so characteristic of his style, not to say of his system. 
The boyish form of this interest in the grotesque may be 
thus exemplified: January 3, 1787. — Total eclipse of 
the moon ; instruments prepared at the gymnasium, where 
some gathered to see, but the sky was too cloudy. So 
the rector “ told us the following : As a boy he himself 
had once gone out with other boys, at night, on the pre¬ 
tence of star-gazing. In reality they had only wandered 
about. The police found them, and were going to take 
them into custody; but the gymnasium boys said, 
‘We’re out star-gazing.’ ‘Nay,’ responded the police, 
‘ but you boys ought to go to bed at night, and do your 
star-gazing in the day-time ! ’ ” I note this trifle because, 
after all, it means more than one would think. Here and 
at other places in the young Hegel’s record appear 
glimpses of a certain deep delight in the paradoxical, a 
delight which, at times merely dry and humorous, at 
times keenly intellectual, would mean little in another 
temperament, but which is, after all, the determining ten¬ 
dency of Hegel’s mind. 

In fact, if one has eyes to see it, the Hegelian tempera¬ 
ment, although not at all the Hegelian depth, is, even as 
early as this, almost completely indicated. Of the later 
philosophical genius, as I have said, there is so far no 
promise; but the general attitude which this genius was 
to render so significant is already taken by the boy Hegel. 
The traits present are, for the first an enormous intellec¬ 
tual acquisitiveness, which finds every sort of learning, 
but above all every sort of literary and humane learning, 
extremely interesting. The pedantry which oppresses the 
German gymnasiast of that day is relieved, meanwhile, by 
this dry and sarcastic Suabian humor, which notes the 
oddities and stupidities of human nature with a keen 
appreciation. The humor involves a love of the gro* 


HEGEL. 


199 


tesque, of the paradoxical, of the eternally self-contradic¬ 
tory in human life. The mature Hegel was to discover 
the deeper meaning of such paradoxes; for the time being 
he simply notes them. For the rest, there is one trait 
already manifest which is also of no small significance in 
Hegel’s life-work. This is a certain observant sensitive¬ 
ness to all manner of conscious processes in other people, 
joined with a singularly cool and impersonal aptitude for 
criticising these processes. Here, indeed, is a feature 
about Hegel which later, in his mature wisdom, assumed a 
very prominent place, and which always makes him, even 
apart from his style, very hard for some people to com¬ 
prehend. We are used in literature to the man who sym¬ 
pathizes personally with the passions of his fellows, and 
who thus knows their hearts because of the warmth of his 
own heart. We know also something of the tragically 
cynical type of man, who, like Swift, not because he is 
insensitive, but because he is embittered, sees, or chooses 
to describe in passion, only its follies. We have all about 
us, moreover, the simply unfeeling, to whom passion is an 
impenetrable mystery, because they are naturally blind to 
its depth and value. But Hegel’s type is one of the rar¬ 
est, the one, namely, whose representative man will, so to 
speak, tell you in a few preternaturally accurate, though 
perhaps highly technical words, all that ever you did, who 
will seem to sound your heart very much as a skillful 
specialist in nervous diseases would sound the mysterious 
and secret depths of a morbid patient’s consciousness; but 
who, all the while, is apparently himself as free from deep 
personal experiences of an emotional type as the physician 
is free from his patient’s morbid and nervous web-spin¬ 
ning. Hegel has this quasi-professional type of sensitive¬ 
ness about his whole bearing towards life. Nobody 
keener or more delicately alive and watchful than he to 
comprehend, but also nobody more merciless to dissect, 
the wisest and the tenderest passions of the heart. And 


200 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

yet, it is not all mercilessness in his case. When he has 
analyzed, he does not condemn after the cynic’s fashion. 
After the dissection comes reconstruction. He singles 
out what he takes to be the truly humane in passion, he 
describes the artistic or the religious interests of man, he 
pictures the more admirable forms of self-consciousness ; 
and now, indeed, his speech may assume at moments a 
religious, even a mystical tone. He praises, he depicts 
approvingly, he admires the absolute worth of these 
things. You feel that at last you have found his heart 
also in a glow. But no ; this, too, is an illusion. A word 
erelong undeceives you as to his personal attitude. He 
is only engaged in his trade as shrewd professor; he is 
only telling you the true and objective value of things; 
he is not making any serious expression of his own piety 
or wealth of concern. He is still the critic. His admira¬ 
tion was the approval of the onlooker. In his private 
person he remains what he was before, untouched by the 
glow of heart of the very seraphs themselves. 

In the year 1788, Hegel entered the university of his 
province at Tubingen. Here he studied until 1793, being 
somewhat interrupted in his academic work by ill health. 
His principal study was theology. A certificate given him 
at the conclusion of his course declared that he was a man 
of some gifts and industry, but that he had paid no seri¬ 
ous attention to philosophy. His reading, however, had 
been very varied. In addition to theology, he had shown 
a great fondness for the Greek tragedians. His most in¬ 
timate student friends of note had been the young poet 
Holderlin and Schelling himself. Nobody had yet de¬ 
tected any element of greatness in Hegel. The friend¬ 
ship with Schelling was now continued in the form of a 
correspondence, which lasted while Hegel, as an obscure 
family tutor, passed the years from 1793 to 1796 in Swit¬ 
zerland, and then, in a similar capacity, worked in Frank- 
fort-on-the-Main until the end of 1800, when, through 


HEGEL. 


201 


Schelling’s assistance, he found an opportunity to enter 
upon an academic career at the University of Jena. Dur¬ 
ing all these years Hegel matured slowly, and printed 
nothing. The letters to Schelling are throughout written 
in a flattering and receptive tone. Philosophy becomes 
more prominent in Hegel’s thought and correspondence 
as time goes on. To Schelling he appeals as to the 
elect leader of the newest evolution in thought. From 
the Kantian philosophy, he says, a great, new creative 
movement is to grow, and the central idea of this new 
movement will be the doctrine of the absolute and infinite 
self, whose constructive processes shall explain the funda¬ 
mental laws of the world. This notion Hegel expresses 
already in 1795, when he is but twenty-five and Schelling 
is but twenty years old. But as to the development of 
the new system in his own mind he gives little or no hint 
until 1800, just before joining Schelling at Jena. Then, 
as he confesses to his friend, “ the ideal of my youth has 
had to take a reflective form, and has become a system ; 
and I now am asking how I can return to life and set 
about influencing men.” He had actually, by this time, 
written an outline of his future doctrine, which was al¬ 
ready in all its essentials fully defined. On his first ap¬ 
pearance at Jena, however, he was content to appear as a 
co-worker and even as in part an expositor of Schelling, 
and probably he purposely exaggerated the agreement 
between his friend and himself so long as he found Schel¬ 
ling’s reputation and assistance a valuable introduction to 
the learned world, in which the youthful romanticist was 
already a great figure, while Hegel himself was so far 
unknown. In 1801, Hegel began his lectures as Privat- 
Docent at the university. In 1803, Schelling left the 
university, and Hegel, now dependent upon himself, ere¬ 
long made no secret of the fact that he had his own rela¬ 
tively independent philosophy, and that he could find as 
yet nothing definite and final about his friend’s writings. 


202 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


His own first great book, the “ Phanomenologie des 
Geistes,” finished at about the time of the battle of Jena, 
and published early in 1807, completed his separation 
from Schelling, whose romantic vagueness he unmerci¬ 
fully ridiculed, without naming Schelling himself, in the 
long preface with which the book opened. In a letter to 
Schelling accompanying a copy of the “ Phanomenologie,” 
Hegel indeed explained that his ridicule must be under¬ 
stood as directed against the misuse which the former’s 
followers were making of the romantic method in philoso¬ 
phy ; but the language of the preface was unmistakable. 
Schelling replied curtly, and the correspondence ended. 
After the period of confusion which followed the battle of 
Jena, Hegel, who had been temporarily forced to abandon 
the scholastic life, found a place as gymnasium director at 
Niirnberg, where he married in 1811. In 1816, he was 
called to a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg. 
He had already published his “ Logic.” In 1818, he was 
called to Berlin, and here rapidly rose to the highest 
academic success. He had a great following, came into 
especial court favor, reached an almost despotic position 
in the world of German philosophic thought, and died of 
cholera, at the very height of his fame, in November, 
1831. 

If we now undertake in a few words to characterize 
Hegel’s doctrine, we must first of all cut loose almost 
entirely from that traditional description of his system 
which has been repeated in the text-books until almost 
everybody has forgotten what it means, and has therefore 
come to accept it as true. We must furthermore limit 
our attention to Hegel’s theory of the nature of self-con¬ 
sciousness, laying aside all detailed study of the rest of 
his elaborate system. And finally we must be rude to our 
thinker, as he was to every one else ; we must take what 
we regard as his “ secret ” (to borrow Dr. Stirling’s 
word) out of the peculiar language in which Hegel chose 


HEGEL. 


203 


to express it, and out of the systematic tomb where he 
would have insisted upon burying it. So treated, Hegel’s 
doctrine will appear as an analysis of the fundamental 
paradox of our consciousness. 

In terms of this paradox he will try to define, first the 
relation of the finite and the infinite self, then the relation 
between mind and reality. 


in. 

The world of our daily life, Kant had said, has good 
order and connection in it, not because the absolute order 
of external things in themselves is known to us, but (as 
I have reworded Kant) because we are sane, because our 
understanding, then, has its own coherence, and must see 
its experience in the light of this coherence. Idealism 
has already drawn the obvious conclusion from all this. 
If this be so, if it is our understanding that actually 
creates the order of nature for us, then the problem, 
“ How shall I comprehend my world?” becomes no more 
or less than the problem, “ How shall I understand my¬ 
self ? ” We have already suggested into what romantic 
extravagances the effort to know exhaustively the inner 
life had by this time led. Some profound, but still vague 
relation was felt to exist between my own self and an in¬ 
finite self. To this vague relation, which Fichte conceived 
in purely ethical terms, and which the romanticists tried 
to grasp in numerous arbitrary and fantastic ways, phi¬ 
losophy was accustomed to appeal. My real self is 
deeper than my conscious self, and this real self is bound¬ 
less, far spreading, romantic, divine. Only poets and 
other geniuses can dream of it justly. But nobody can 
tell squarely and simply, mit durren Worten , just what 
lie means by it. Now Hegel, as a maliciously cool-headed 
and sternly unromantic Suabian, did indeed himself be¬ 
lieve in the infinite self, but he regarded all this vague¬ 
ness of the romanticists with contempt, and even with a 


204 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


certain rude mirtli. He appreciated all its enthusiasm in 
his own external way, of course ; he could even talk after 
that dreamy fashion himself, and once, not to the credit of 
his wisdom, perhaps not quite to the credit of his honesty, 
he did so, in an early essay, published, as we must note, 
while he was still Schelling’s academic nursling at Jena. 
But he despised vagueness, and when the time came he 
said so. Yet still for him the great question of philoso¬ 
phy lay just where the romanticists had found it, yes, just 
where Kant himself had left it. My conscious and pres¬ 
ent self is n’t the whole of me. I am constantly appeal¬ 
ing to my own past, to my own future self, and to my 
deeper self, also, as it now is. Whatever I affirm, or 
doubt, or deny, I am always searching my own mind for 
proof, for support, for guidance. Such searching consti¬ 
tutes in one sense all my active mental life. All philoso¬ 
phy then turns, as Kant had shown, upon understanding 
who and what I am, and who my deeper self is. Hegel 
recognizes this ; but he will not dream about it. He 
undertakes an analysis, therefore, which we must here re¬ 
word in our own fashion, and for the most part with our 
own illustrations . 1 

Examine yourself at any instant: “ I,” you say, 

“ know just now this that is now present to me, this feel¬ 
ing, this sound, this thought. Of past and future, of re¬ 
mote things, of other people, I can conjecture this or that, 
but just now and here I know whatever is here and now 
for me.” Yes, indeed, but what is here and now for me? 
See, even as I try to tell, the here and now have flown . 
I know this note of music that sounds, this wave that 
breaks on the beach. No, not so, even as I try to tell 
what I now know, the note has sounded and ceased, the 
wave is broken and another wave curves onward to its fall. 
I cannot say, “ I know.” I must always say, “ I just 

1 What immediately follows is of course suggested by the opening 
of the argument in the Phanomenologie. 


HEGEL. 


205 


knew.” But what was it I just knew ? Is it already past 
and gone ? Then how can I now be knowing it at all ? 
One sees this endless paradox of consciousness, this eter¬ 
nal flight of myself from myself. After all, do I really 
ever know any one abiding or even momentarily finished 
and clearly present thing? No, indeed. I am eternally 
changing my mind. All that I know, then, is not any 
present moment, but the moment that is just past, and the 
change from that moment to this. My momentary self, 
then, has knowledge in so far as it knows, recognizes, 
accepts, another self, the self of the moment just past. 
And again, my momentary self is known to the self of 
the next succeeding moment, and so on in eternal and 
fatal flight. All this is an old paradox. The poets 
make a great deal of it. You can illustrate endlessly its 
various forms and shadings. That I don’t know my 
present mind, but can only review my past mind is 
the reason, for instance, why I never precisely know 
that I am happy at the very instant when I am happy. 
After a merry evening I can think it all over, and say, 
“ Yes, I have been happy. It all was good.” Only then, 
mark you, the happiness is over. But still, you may say, 
I know that the memory of my past happiness is itself a 
happy thing. No, not even this do I now directly know. 
If I reflect on my memory of past joy, I see once more, 
but in a second reflective memory, that my previous mem¬ 
ory of joy was itself joyous. But, as you see, I get each 
new joy as my own in knowledge only when it has fled in 
being. It is my memory, that but a moment since or a 
while since I was joyful, that constitutes my knowledge 
of my joy. This is a somewhat sad paradox. I feel my 
best joys just when I know them least, namely, in my 
least reflective moments. To know that I enjoy is to re¬ 
flect, and to reflect is to remember a joy past. But 
surely, then, one may say, when I suffer I can know that 
I am miserable. Yes, but once more only reflectively. 


206 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Each pang is past when I come to know that it was just 
now mine. “ That is over,” I say, “ what next? ” And it 
is this horror of the “ what next ? ” this looking for my sor¬ 
row elsewhere than in the present, namely, in the dreaded 
and on-coming fatal future, that constitutes the deepest 
pang of loneliness, of defeat, of shame, or of bereave¬ 
ment. My illustrations are still my own, not Hegel’s . 1 

The result of all this possibly too elaborate web-spin¬ 
ning of ours is not far to seek. We wanted to know who 
any one of us at any moment is; and the answer to the 
question is: Each one of us is what some other moment 
of his life reflectively finds him to be. It is a mysterious 
and puzzling fact, but it is true. No one of us knows 
what he now is; he can only know what he was . Each 
one of us, however, is now only what hereafter he shall 
find himself to be. This is the deepest paradox of the 
inner life. We get self-possession, self-apprehension, 
self-knowledge, only through endlessly fleeing from our¬ 
selves, and then turning back to look at what we were . 2 
But this paradox relates not merely to moments. It re¬ 
lates to all life. Youth does not know its own deep mind. 
Mature life or old age reflectively discovers a part of 
what youth meant, and sorrows now that the meaning is 
known only when the game is ended. All feeling, all 
character, all thought, all life, exists for us only in so far 
as it can be reflected upon, viewed from without, seen at 

1 Hegel’s illustrations are more commonly from more highly re¬ 
flective stages of consciousness. Yet the key to the “ movement ” 
of the whole “ Logic ” lies in just this fashion of viewing the facts 
of life and thought. 

2 Cf. Logik, vol. i. (Werke, vol. iii.), pp. 99, 114, 152, 283, and 285, 
for a series of expressions, in highly abstract form, of the nature of 
this process as manifested in case of various logical constructions and 
categories. The commonest technical name for the process is Nega¬ 
tion der Negation (1. c. p. 99), explained further on page 114. On page 
152 the verb zuriickkehren is employed to name the same act; so 

p. 288. 


HEGEL. 


207 


a distance, acknowledged by another than itself, reworded 
in terms of fresh experience. Stand still where you are, 
stand alone, isolate your life, and forthwith you are no¬ 
thing. Enter into relations, exist for the reflective thought 
of yourself, or of other people, criticise yourself and be 
criticised, observe yourself and be observed, exist, and at 
the same time look upon yourself and be looked upon from 
without, and then indeed you are somebody, — a self with 
a consistency and a vitality, a being with a genuine life . 1 

In short, then, take me moment by moment, or take 
me in the wdiole of my life, and this comes out as the 
paradox of my existence, namely, I know myself only in 
so far as I am known or may be known by another than 
my present or momentary self. Leave me alone to the 
self-consciousness of this moment, and I shrivel up into a 
mere atom, an unknowable feeling, a nothing. My exis¬ 
tence is in a sort of conscious publicity of my inner life . 2 

Let me draw at once an analogy between this fact of 
the inner life and the well-known fact of social life to 
which I just made reference. This analogy evidently 
struck Hegel with a great deal of force, as he often refers 
to it. We are all aware, if we have ever tried it, how 
empty and ghostly is a life lived for a long while in abso¬ 
lute solitude. Free me from my fellows, let me alone to 
work out the salvation of my own glorious self, and surely 
(so I may fancy) I shall now for the first time show who 
I am. No, not so; on the contrary I merely show in such 
a case who I am not. I am no longer friend, brother, 
companion, co-worker, servant, citizen, father, son; I ex¬ 
ist for nobody; and erelong, perhaps to my surprise, 
generally to my horror, I discover that I am nobody. 
The one thing means the other. In the dungeon of my 

1 The Kampf des Anerkennens of the Phdnomenologie. 

2 Brief general descriptions of the process and paradox of self- 
consciousness as such are : Phdnomenologie , p. 125 ; Logik , Werke, vol. 
iii. p. 66, and vol. v. p. 13 ; Encyklopadie , Werke, vol. vi. pp. 47, 91. 


208 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


isolated self-consciousness I rot away unheeded and terror- 
stricken. Idiocy is before me, and my true self is far be¬ 
hind, in those bright and bitter days when I worked and 
suffered with my fellows. My freedom from others is my 
doom, the most insufferable form of bondage. Could I 
speak to a living soul! If any one knew of me, looked 
at me, thought of me, yes, hated me even, how blessed 
would be the deliverance ! Now note the analogy here 
between the inner life in each of us and the social life 
that each of us leads. Within myself the rule holds that 
I live consciously only in so far as I am known and re¬ 
flected upon by my subsequent life. Beyond what is 
called my private self, however, a similar rule holds. I 
exist in a vital and humane sense only in relation to my 
friends, my social business, my family, my fellow-workers, 
my world of other selves. This is the rule of mental life. 
We are accustomed to speak of consciousness as if it were 
w r holly an inner affair, which each one has at each mo¬ 
ment solely in and by himself. But, after all, what con¬ 
sciousness do we then refer to ? What is love but the 
consciousness that somebody is there who either loves me 
(and then I rejoice) or does not (and then I am gloomy 
or jealous) ? What is self-respect but a conscious appeal 
to others to respect my right or my worth ? And if you 
talk of one’s secret heart, what is it but just that inner 
brooding in one’s own conscious life which so much the 
more illustrates, as we say, the very impossibility of know¬ 
ing myself except by looking back on my past self. See, 
then, it makes no difference how you look at me, you find 
the same thing. All consciousness is an appeal to other 
consciousness . 1 That is the essence of it. The inner life 
is, as Hegel would love to express it, ehensosehr an outer 
life. Spirituality is just intercourse, communion of spir¬ 
its. This is the essential publicity of consciousness, 
whereby all the secrets of our hearts are known . 2 

1 Pfianomenologie , p. 135. 

2 The word “ publicity ” is a very fair representative of Allgemein - 


HEGEL. 


209 


Here, then, Hegel has come upon the track of a pro¬ 
cess in consciousness whereby my private self and that 
deeper self of the romanticists may be somewhat more 
definitely connected. Let us state this process a little 
abstractedly. A conscious being is to think, or to feel, or 
to do something. Very well, then, he must surely think 
or do this, one would say, in some one moment. So be it; 
but as a conscious being he is also to know that he thinks 
or does this. To this end, however, he must exist in 
more than one moment. He must first act, and then live 
to know that he has acted. The self that acts is one, the 
self that knows of the act is another. Here, then, there 
are at least two moments, already two selves. We see at 
once how the same process could be indefinitely repeated. 
In order to know myself at all, I must thus live out an in¬ 
definitely numerous series of acts and moments. I must 
become many selves and live in their union and coherence. 
But still more. Suppose that what our self-conscious be¬ 
ing has to do is to prove a proposition in geometry. As 
he proves, he appeals to somebody, his other self, so to 
speak, to observe that his proof is sound. Or again, sup¬ 
pose that what he does is to love, to hate, to beseech, to 
pity, to appeal for pity, to feel proud, to despise, to exhort, 
to feel charitable, to long for sympathy, to converse, to do, 
in short, any of the social acts that make up, when taken 
all together, the whole of our innermost self-conscious¬ 
ness. All these acts, we see, involve at least the appeal 
to many selves, to society, to other spirits. We have no 
life alone. There is no merely inner self. There is the 
world of selves. We live in our coherence with other 
people, in our relationships. To sum it all up : From 
first to last the law of conscious existence is this paradox- 

Jieit as applied to self-consciousness by Hegel in the highly important 
§ 436 of the Encyklopadie, Werke, vol. vii. 2, p. 283. Here already 
appears the nature of the true Universal of Hegel’s system. Organic 
interrelationship of individuals is the condition even of their relatively 
independent selfhood. 


210 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


ical but real self-differentiation, whereby I, the so-called 
inner self, am through and through one of many selves, 
so that my inner self is already an outer, a revealed, an 
expressed self. The only mind then is the world of many 
related minds. It is of the essence of consciousness to 
find its inner reality by losing itself in outer, but spiritual 
relationships. Who am I then at this moment? I am 
just this knot of relationships to other moments and to 
other people. Do I converse busily and with absorption ? 
Then I am but just now this centre of the total conscious¬ 
ness of all those who are absorbed in this conversation. 
And so always it is of the essence of spirit to differen¬ 
tiate itself into many spirits, and to live in their relation¬ 
ships, to be one by virtue solely of their coherence. 

The foregoing illustrations of Hegel’s paradox, some of 
which in these latter paragraphs have been his own, have 
not begun to suggest how manifold are, according to him, 
its manifestations. So paradoxical and so true does it 
seem to him, however, that he looks for further analogies 
of the same process in other regions of our conscious life. 
What we have found is that if I am to be I, “ as I think 
I be,” I must be more than merely I. I become myself 
by forsaking my isolation and by entering into commu¬ 
nity. My self-possession is always and everywhere self¬ 
surrender to my relationships. But now is not this para¬ 
dox of the spirit applicable still further in life ? Does n’t 
a similar law hold of all that we do in yet a deeper sense? 
If you want to win any end, not merely the end of know¬ 
ing yourself, but say the end of becoming ‘ holy, is n’t it 
true that, curiously enough, you in vain strive to become 
holy if you merely strive for holiness ? Just pure holi¬ 
ness, what would it be ? To have never a worldly thought, 
to be peaceful, calm, untroubled, absolutely pure in spirit, 
without one blot or blemish, — that would indeed be noble, 
would it ? But consider, if one were thus quite unworldly 
just because one had never an unworldly thought, what 


HEGEL. 


211 


would that be but simple impassivity, innocence, pure 
emptiness? An innocent little cherub, that, just born 
into a pure light, had never even heard that there was a 
world at all, he would indeed in this sense be unworldly. 
But is such holiness the triumphant holiness of those that 
really excel in strength ? Of course if I had never even 
heard of the world, I should not be a lover of the world. 
But that would be because of my ignorance. And all 
sorts of things can be alike ignorant, — cherubs, young 
tigers, infant Napoleons, or Judases. Yes, the very 
demons of the pit might have begun by being ignorant of 
the universe. If so, they would have been so far hoty. 
But, after all, is such holiness worth much as holiness ? It 
is indeed worth a good deal as innocence, just to be 
looked at. A young tiger or a baby Napoleon fast asleep, 
or a new created demon that had not yet grown beyond 
the cherub stage — we should all like to look at such 
pretty creatures. But such holiness is no ideal for us 
moral agents. Here we are with the world in our hands, 
beset already with temptation and with all the pangs of 
our finitude. For us holiness means, not the abolition 
of worldliness, not innocence, not turning away from the 
world, but the victory that overcometh the world, the 
struggle, the courage, the vigor, the endurance, the hot 
fight with sin, the facing of the demon, the power to have 
him there in us and to hold him by the throat, the living 
and ghastly presence of the enemy, and the triumphant 
wrestling with him and keeping him forever a panting, 
furious, immortal thrall and bondman. That is all the 
holiness we can hope for. Yes, this is the only true holi¬ 
ness. Such triumph alone does the supreme spirit know, 
who is tempted in all points like as we are, yet without 
sin. Holiness, you see, exists by virtue of its opposite. 
Holiness is a consciousness of sin with a consciousness of 
the victory over sin. Only the tempted are holy, and 
they only when they win against temptation. 


212 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


All this I set down here, not merely because I believe 
it, although indeed I do, but because Hegel’s cool diag¬ 
nosis of life loves to mark just such symptoms as this. 
“ Die Tugend,” says he in one passage of his “ Logic,” 
“ die Tugend ist der hoehste, vollendete Kampf .” 1 Holi¬ 
ness, then, is the very height of the struggle with evil. 
It is a paradox, all this. And it is the same paradox of 
consciousness over again. You want the consciousness of 
virtue; you win it, not by innocence, but through its own 
very opposite, namely, through meeting the enemy, endur¬ 
ing and overcoming. Consciousness here once more, as 
before, differentiates itself into various, into contrasted, 
forms and lives in their relationships, their conflicts, their 
contradictions, and in the triumph over these. As the 
warrior rejoices in the foeman worthy of his steel, and 
rejoices in him just because he wants to overcome and to 
slay him; as courage exists by the triumph over terror, 
and as there is no courage in a world where there is 
nothing terrible; as strength consists in the mastery of 
obstacles; as even love is proved only through suffering, 
grows deep only when sorrow was with it, becomes often 
the tenderer because it is wounded by misunderstanding; 
so, in short, everywhere in conscious life, consciousness 
is a union, an organization, of conflicting aims, purposes, 
thoughts, stirrings. And just this, according to Hegel, is 
the very perfection of consciousness. There is nothing 
simple in it, nothing unmittelbar , nothing there till you 
win it, nothing consciously known or possessed till you 
prove it by conflict with its opposite, till you develop its 
inner contradictions and triumph over them. This is the 
fatal law of life. This is the pulse of the spiritual world. 

For see, once more: our illustrations have run from 
highest to lowest in life. Everywhere, from the most 

1 Werke, vol. iv., p. 63. The spirit of the foregoing exposition of 
the essence of holiness is found expressed in many places, especially 
in the Religionsphilosophie. 


HEGEL. 


213 


trivial games, where the players are always risking loss 
in order to enjoy triumph, from the lowest crudities of 
savage existence, where the warriors prove their heroism 
by lacerating their own flesh, up to the highest conflicts 
and triumphs of the spirit, the law holds good. Spiritu¬ 
ality lives by self-differentiation into mutually opposing 
forces, and by victory in and over these oppositions. 
This law it is that Hegel singles out and makes the basis 
of his system. This is the logic of passion which he so 
skillfully diagnoses, and so untiringly and even mercilessly 
applies to all life. He gives his law various very techni¬ 
cal names. He calls it the law of the universal Negati- 
vitat of self-conscious life ; and Negativitat means simply 
this principle of self-differentiation, by which, in order 
to possess any form of life, virtue, or courage, or wisdom, 
or self-consciousness, you play, as it were, the game of 
consciousness, set over against yourself your opponent,— 
the wicked impulse that your goodness holds by the 
throat, the cowardice that your courage conquers, the 
problem that your wisdom solves, — and then live by 
winning your game against this opponent. Having found 
this law, Hegel undertakes, by a sort of exhaustive induc¬ 
tion, to apply it to the explanation of every conscious rela- 
tion, and to construct, in terms of this principle of the 
self-differentiation of spirit, the whole mass of our rational 
relations to one another, to the world, and to God. His 
principle is, in another form, this: that the deeper self 
which the romanticists sought is to be found and defined 
only by spiritual struggle, toil, conflict; by setting over 
against our private selves the world of our tasks, of our 
relationships, and by developing, defining, and mastering 
these tasks and relationships until we shall find, through 
the very stress and vastness and necessity and spirituality 
of the conflict, that we are in God’s own infinite world of 
spiritual warfare and of absolute restless self-conscious¬ 
ness. The more of a self I am, the more contradictions 


214 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


there are in my nature and the completer my conquest 
over these contradictions. The absolute self with which I 
am seeking to raise my soul, and which erelong I find to be 
a genuine self, yes, the only self, exists by the very might 
of its control over all these contradictions, whose infinite 
variety furnishes the very heart and content of its life. 

Hegel, as we see, makes his Absolute, the Lord, most 
decidedly a man of war. Consciousness is paradoxical, 
restless, struggling. Weak souls get weary of the fight, 
and give up trying to get wisdom, skill, virtue, because all 
these are won only in presence of the enemy. But the ab¬ 
solute self is simply the absolutely strong spirit who bears 
the contradictions of life, and wins the eternal victory. 

Yet one may say, if this is Hegel’s principle, it amounts 
simply to showing us how conflict and active mastery con¬ 
tinually enlarge our finite selves. Does it enable us to 
prove that anywhere in the world there is this absolute self 
which embraces and wins all the conflicts ? Hegel tells 
us how the individual self is related to the deeper self, 
how the inner life finds itself through its own realization 
in the contradictions of the outer life. But does he any¬ 
where show that God exists ? 

To show this is precisely his object. I am not here 
judging how well he succeeds. The deepest presupposi¬ 
tion, he thinks, of all this paradoxical conscious life of 
ours is the existence of the absolute self, which exists, to 
be sure, not apart from the world, but in this whole organ¬ 
ized human warfare of ours. Only Hegel is not at all 
content to state this presupposition mystically. He de¬ 
sires to use his secret, — his formula for the very essence 
of consciousness, his fundamental law of rationality, to 
unlock problem after problem until he reaches the idea of 
the absolute self. Of the systematic fashion in which he 
attacked this task in his “ Logic,” in his “ Encyclopaedia,” 
and in his various courses of lectures, I can give no very 
satisfying notion,. To my mind, however, he did his work 


HEGEL. 


215 


best of all in liis deepest and most difficult book, the “ Phe¬ 
nomenology of Spirit.” Here he seeks to show how, in 
case you start just with yourself alone, and ask who you 
are and what you know, you are led on, step by step, 
through a process of active self-enlargement that cannot 
stop short of the recognition of the Absolute Spirit himself 
as the very heart and soul of your own life. This process 
consists everywhere in a repetition of the fundamental 
paradox of consciousness: In order to realize what I am I 
must, as I find, become more than I am or than I know 
myself to be. I must enlarge myself, conceive myself as 
in external relationships, go beyond my private self, pre¬ 
suppose the social life, enter into conflict, and, winning 
the conflict, come nearer to realizing my unity with my 
deeper self. But the real understanding of this process 
only comes, according to Hegel, .when you observe that 
in trying thus to enlarge yourself for the very purpose 
of self-comprehension you repeat ideally the evolution of 
human civilization in your own person. This process of 
self-enlargement is the process which is writ large in the 
history of mankind. The “ Phenomenology ” is thus a sort 
of freely told philosophy of history. It begins with the 
Spirit on a crude and sensual stage; it follows his para¬ 
doxes, his social enlargement, his perplexities, his rebel¬ 
lions, his skepticism, all his wanderings, until he learns, 
through toils and anguish and courage, such as represent 
the whole travail of humanity, that he is, after all, in his 
very essence the absolute and divine spirit himself, who is 
present already on the savage stage in the very brutalities 
of master and slave; who comes to a higher life in the 
family; who seeks freedom again and again in romantic 
sentimentality or in stoical independence; who learns, 
however, always afresh that in such freedom there is no 
truth; who returns, therefore, willingly to the bondage of 
good citizenship and of social morality; and who, finally, 
in the religious consciousness, comes to an appreciation of 


216 . THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

the lesson that he has learned through this whole self- 
enlarging process of civilization, — the lesson, namely, 
that all consciousness is a manifestation of the one law of 
spiritual life, and so, finally, of the one Eternal Spirit. 
The Absolute of Hegel’s “ Phenomenology ” is no absolute 
on parade, so to speak, — no God that hides himself be¬ 
hind clouds and darkness, nor yet a Supreme Being who 
keeps himself carefully clean and untroubled in the re¬ 
cesses of an inaccessible infinity. No, Hegel’s Absolute 
is, I repeat, a man of war. The dust and the blood of 
ages of humanity’s spiritual life are upon him; he comes 
before us pierced and wounded, but triumphant, — the 
God who has conquered contradictions, and who is simply 
the total spiritual consciousness that expresses, embraces, 
unifies, and enjoys the whole wealth of our human loyalty, 
endurance, and passion. 

IY. 

But still you may ask, Does all this yet give us the con¬ 
ditions of a genuine philosophical system ? Does it ex¬ 
plain outer nature and physical causation ? does it explain 
perception and knowledge ? does it tell us the true nature 
of things ? In brief, as you see, all this doctrine of He¬ 
gel’s seems essentially ethical, practical, an exposition of 
spirituality, — not a theoretical account of nature. Well, 
Hegel believes himself to be in possession of devices 
whereby he can make his essentially practical categories 
of a deep theoretical significance. Consider, namely, 
those problems of the external world, of space and time, 
of cause and effect, of law and phenomena, of substance 
and show, of nature and of man, which previous philoso¬ 
phy has been treating. How do these problems arise, 
and what is their universal character ? Are n’t they 
always problems about some paradoxical opposition that 
seems to exist in the nature of reality, and that baffles 
the human understanding just because both the opposed 


HEGEL. 


217 


terms, — say, for instance, knowing subject and known 
object; or true reality and seeming reality; or things in 
themselves and phenomena ; or finite and infinite, —just 
because, I say, both these opposed terms in each pair 
seem to be separate, sundered, mutually irreducible, in¬ 
accessible each to other, while yet both the opposed things 
nevertheless continually force themselves upon us, and 
demand of us an explanation. Philosophy is a nest of 
such problems. They vex men endlessly ; they gave 
Kant his troublesome pairs of contradictory assertions 
about space and time; they gave Fichte the puzzle about 
self and not-self; they gave Hume the problem about 
facts and laws, about experience that could never find 
necessity, and necessity that continually pretended to 
inflict itself upon experience. A logical system of such 
problems and of their solutions would be a complete 
theoretical philosophy, an account of the absolute, such as 
Schelling had dreamed of. Well, in our formula of the 
universal Negativitat of the spiritual life, have n’t we 
found precisely the formula that would both state and 
solves such puzzles as these? Spirit it is that makes 
the world. That, you remember, is, since Kant, presup¬ 
position of this whole age. The spirit, then, because of 
its Negativitat, will everywhere differentiate itself, and 
therefore, throughout all its universe, from the atoms to 
the archangels, will create seeming oppositions, will bur¬ 
den itself with a wealth of magnificent paradoxes; and 
will do this equally and obstinately in the world of theory, 
as well as in the world of practice. If, therefore, we 
have the key to the process whereby the spirit wins unity 
in the midst of its own oppositions, then the puzzle of 
Hume and the problems of Kant, the conflicts of empiri¬ 
cal research and of a 'priori speculation, — yes, all the 
puzzles that the history of philosophy shows us, can be 
stated and solved; for they will all be cases of the same 
fundamental paradox of self-consciousness. The talisman 


218 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


of the logic of passion will cause to open the doors of the 
richest treasure-houses of theoretical research. It is with 
this notion in mind that Hegel, influenced by Schelling’s 
example, even as Schelling had been by his own, sets out 
to expound, not merely the history of the human or even 
of the absolute spirit, but the nature and the solution of 
every philosophical problem concerning the absolute as 
the history of philosophy has presented such problems 
to us, whether in the fundamental questions of logic, or 
in the inquiries of the philosophy of nature. 1 need not 
say that this stupendous undertaking was but indifferently 
executed. 

It is just this undertaking, however, that gives the He¬ 
gelian system its peculiarly technical and abstruse for¬ 
mulation. 

The system itself is set forth in three divisions : the 
“ Logic,” the “ Philosophy of Nature,” and the “ Philoso¬ 
phy of Spirit.” The “ logic ” is an exposition, in the most 
orderly and technical form, of the fundamental thoughts, 
or “categories,” which are to be found exemplified in 
all the facts of this our world of the self. As for these 
categories themselves, the history of philosophy furnishes 
them to Hegel. They are such fundamental ideas as 
those of Being and Something; of Many and One ; of 
Quality, and Quantity, and Relation ; of Essence and 
Phenomenon ; of Form and Matter; of Inner and Outer; 
of Law and Substance; of Subject and Object; of 
Thought and the Absolute. You can’t get on in phi¬ 
losophy without using such conceptions. They are the 
coinage of the spiritual realm. If you try to set forth 
truth you must employ them; if you want to understand 
truth, you must comprehend them. And now compre¬ 
hension of these categories is n’t to be got by merely de¬ 
fining them in abstract fashion, as Euclid defines a circle, 
or Spinoza his substance. Definition, simple, positive, 
hard and fast as it is, never tells the whole truth about 


HEGEL. 


219 


a conception ; for every fundamental conception is really 
to be comprehended only by viewing it in the true and yet 
paradoxical relation to its own opposite, that, as a product 
of self-consciousness, this conception must have. We have 
already seen how virtue and vice, present consciousness 
and past consciousness, individual consciousness and social 
consciousness, inner life and outer life, are indefinable, in¬ 
comprehensible, save by virtue of an insight into just 
that wondrous union of conflicting tendencies whereby 
each of the opposed conceptions gets its meaning for us. 
It is the flow, the change, the conflict of thought that the 
philosopher has to follow. In vain, for instance, do you 
try to define substance after Spinoza’s fashion as a merely 
eternal, fixed, congealed, and immobile truth. The sub¬ 
stance of this world, of this universe of the self, must 
be a truth that lives in the very stream and struggle of 
finite and seeming existence. The true substance of the 
world is n’t hidden, but revealed by the passionate change 
and ebb and flow of the phenomena; for the true sub¬ 
stance is the self, the subject ; and he preserves himself 
by living, for he is the living God. As such, philosophy 
has to show him. Therefore you can’t abstractly define 
his nature, apart from finite things and relations. You 
must concretely realize,- even in your notion of substance, 
the organic unity in endless differentiation of which his 
universe is the embodiment. Even so it is with other 
categories. You comprehend them by virtue of their 
paradoxes. The “ Logic ” undertakes to be an exhaustive 
analysis of such paradoxes of the fundamental concep¬ 
tions. 

The method of the “ Logic,” then, is what Hegel calls 
the dialectical method. It is the method of what we have 
called the logic of passion, applied to the most theoreti¬ 
cal and seemingly least passionate of human conceptions. 
Take any notion you please. Hegel at once sees in that 
notion the traces of the self-conscious strife whereof it is 


220 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the offspring, or, if you like, the crystallized embodiment. 
Is it quantity that you are talking about ? Then you at 
once observe that there are two ways of looking at quan¬ 
tity. One, to which we get used in elementary arithmetic, 
regards quantity as what we call “discrete,” that is, as 
made up of separate units. The other way, to which we 
get used in geometry and physics, regards quantity as 
continuous. The one fashion counts by units, the other 
measures by standards. Now in the ordinary view, this 
difference in the methods of viewing quantity is thought 
to correspond to an existent difference in the sorts of 
quantity that the world contains. There are discrete 
quantities and there are continuous quantities. But, for 
Hegel, the notion of quantity, as it truly exists, is a notion 
that is the product of self-consciousness, and not a mere 
datum of sense. As such a product of self-conscious¬ 
ness, true quantity proves to be, so he holds, at once both 
continuous and discrete, just as virtue proved to be der 
hochste Kampffl and so to involve both good and evil. 
Quantity is a mathematical thing, a seemingly cold and 
lifeless category, while virtue is obviously a creature of 
holy passion. But none the less is the paradox of self- 
consciousness present in the idea of quantity, just as in 
practical life. Discrete quantity consists of the separate 
and unjointed units. Continuous quantity resists and 
even defies description in terms of disjunct ultimate 
units, as, for instance, a line refuses to be made up of 
points. Yet, as Hegel thinks himself able to show, each 
of these sorts of quantity is such that when you try to 
think out its nature, it afflicts itself, so to speak, with the 
characteristics of the other, takes them on, 1 as Hegel loves 

1 A suggestion of Hegel’s technical use of an ihm or an ihr. Cf. 
LogiJc, Werke, vol. iii. p. 221 : “ In gewohnlichen Vorstellungen von 
continuirlicher unci discreter Grosse wird es ubersehen, dass jede 
dieser Grossen beide Momente, sowohl die Continuitat als die Discre¬ 
tion, an ihr hat.” 


HEGEL. 


221 


to say, in all such cases, just as the good will takes on to 
itself the evil impulse, in order that it may live by over¬ 
coming evil. How Hegel tries to show this in case of 
quantity I have indeed no time to expound. 

By means of this dialectical method Hegel seeks, more¬ 
over, not only to show each logical category as in itself 
an organism of opposed and yet mutually complementary 
elements, but also to show all these fundamental notions 
as forming one system, wherein the most apparently 
diverse and disparate ideas are actually interrelated as 
parts of the one highest and inclusive category, the divine 
Idee , or total thought of the world, whose full realization 
is the absolute self in its spiritual wholeness. The abso¬ 
lute Idee is the notion of the complete self, regarded just 
as a logical category. As true self, it appears to us later, 
in the philosophy of spirit. In the “ Logic ” it is only this 
thought of the total nature of things as being in the 
Hegelian sense self-determined. This thought contains 
all the subordinate categories as organic parts of the 
total, and as parts whose organic relation is precisely 
such as this dialectical, this paradoxical nature of self-con¬ 
sciousness demands. What the citizens are to the state, 
such are the individual categories of thought to the abso¬ 
lute logical Idee. In themselves they are endlessly con¬ 
flicting, and they are yet complementary to one another. 
In their totality they form but one highest category, the 
category of the organic unity of all thoughts in one. The 
Idee is also called by Hegel an objectiver Begriff / the 
real law of laws, the thought of the organic relation of all 
things and thoughts in one universal order. 

One may thus obviously define the “ Logic ” as an effort 
to set forth all fundamental human thoughts as forming an 
organic system. This character of the “ Logic ” the most 
superficial reader at once sees. What is missed by the 
superficial reader of the “ Logic ” is an insight into what, 
1 Logilc , Werke, vol. v. p. 230. 


222 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


according to Hegel’s notion, constitutes organic unity, into 
what is the linkage that ties together the members of his 
kind of organism. This linkage, as we now sufficiently 
know, is the one that the nature of self-consciousness alone 
explains. It is therefore through and through a linkage 
of opposing and complementary members by reason of 
their very oppositions. This is the source of the perplex¬ 
ing analysis of contradictions whereof the “ Logic ” is full. 
The success or failure of the “ Logic ” therefore depends 
upon its author’s right to read the processes of the higher 
practical spirituality into the products of purely theoreti¬ 
cal thinking. Here is the crux of the system. 

One fundamental consideration remains to be mentioned 
as characterizing the “Logic.” Old-fashioned logic called 
itself formal. It discussed categories and methods of 
thinking, but it did not undertake to construct concrete 
truths. Its forms of thought were never real things for 
it. But Hegel’s categories are, of course, more than this. 
The laws of thought are n’t mere abstractions; they are 
the soul of things. In the “ Logic ” one is constructing 
the very essence of the world-self. 

Now, Hegel further expressed this aspect of the matter 
by his remarkable doctrine about the relation between 
Begriffe , or universal notions, and the individual facts 
that fall under these notions. There is an old contro¬ 
versy as to whether individual things, or the classes that 
correspond to general conceptions, are the deepest real¬ 
ities in the world. Science, as Aristotle said, is always of 
the general. When we think, we always think of classes, 
of categories, in brief, of universals. But, on the other 
hand, the facts of the world always appear to our senses 
to be individual. Man, as a mere abstraction, doesn’t 
exist; individual men do. Here is one of the most per¬ 
plexing of the paradoxes of common sense: The business 
of science, namely, is with truth, and truth is always uni¬ 
versal, is known to us as the notion of things, the law of 


HEGEL. 


223 


things, the essence of the world. And, on the other hand, 
science is to be true of facts, and yet the facts, at all 
events as sense views them, are n’t universal, but are just 
the individual facts. This opposition between the form 
of science, which is universality, and the matter of sci¬ 
ence, which is individual fact, gave much trouble already 
to Aristotle, 1 into whose system it introduced a funda¬ 
mental contradiction. Hegel was well aware of this con¬ 
tradiction between the Aristotelian ideal of universal 
knowledge, and the actual theory of the relation of uni¬ 
versal and individuals, as Aristotle developed it in his 
logical treatises. 2 But this ancient paradox, which had 
given ground for one of the most famous of the contro¬ 
versies of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, was pre¬ 
cisely the kind of paradox that Hegel’s method was pecu¬ 
liarly apt to characterize and deal with. In attempting 
his own solution of the problem he was therefore fully 
conscious of its difficulty, and of the relative novelty of 
his own theory. “ The universal in its true and inclusive 
sense is a thought,” he once says, 3 “ that it has cost thou¬ 
sands of years to bring to human consciousness, and that 
received its full recognition only through the aid of Chris¬ 
tianity. The Greeks knew neither God nor man in their 
true universality.” The philosophical formulation of this 
thought is of course, according to Hegel, later than its 
concrete realization ; yes, this philosophical formulation 
of the “ inclusive ” nature of the universal is to be one of 
Hegel’s own peculiar contributions to philosophical theory. 

1 See Zeller’s Philosophic der Griechen, part II. section 2, pp. 304- 
313 (3d edition), for a technical exposition of the resulting diffi¬ 
culties. 

2 Compare the two accounts of Aristotle’s method of work in 
Hegel’s own lectures on the History of Philosophy, Werke, vol. xiv. 
pp. 279, 282. See, also, the characterization of Aristotle’s Logic, id., 
p. 368. 

3 In a lecture, as reported by one of his students, Werke , vol. vi. 
p. 321. 


224 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

The true universal, namely, or as Hegel calls it, the Be* 
griff, whose highest expression is to be the absolute Idee, 
is the organic union of the universal truth and the indi¬ 
vidual facts, an union determined by the principle that 
every truth is a truth constructed by the thought of the 
world-self, and that as such it will exemplify just that 
multiplicity of individual facts in the all-embracing and 
so universal unity of self-consciousness, which we have 
now so fully exemplified. The true universal of the whole 
world is, then, the divine Idee , or “ all-enfolding ” nature 
of things, the true genus within which all individual facts 
fall. This universal is no abstraction at all, but a per¬ 
fectly concrete whole, since the facts are, one and all, not 
mere examples of it, but are embraced in it, are brought 
forth by it as its moments, and exist only in relation to 
one another and to it. It is the vine; they, the indi¬ 
viduals, are the branches. It is in nature the self. They 
are the individual thoughts, aspects, finite expressions, em¬ 
bodiments of the self. “ All reality ,” says Hegel, in one 
striking passage, “ is the Idee. . . . The individual being 
is some aspect ( Seite') of the Idee. As such it therefore 
needs other realities [beside it], which seem as if they 
also existed all by themselves; yet only in them together 
and in their relationship is the universal realized. The 
individual by itself does not embody its universal .” 1 
Thus the paradox of the relation of universal and indi¬ 
vidual is to be solved in a manner peculiarly character¬ 
istic of the whole system. The true law is to be the 
organic total of the facts that fall under it. The true 
general class, the actual object of science, is not an ab¬ 
stract something exemplified by the individuals, nor yet 
an essence that is to be found in each individual. There 
is no such thing for Hegel as a merely individual object 
of thought existent all alone for itself. The total world 
of the interrelated individuals is all that exists. The uni. 

1 Werke , vol. vi. p. 385. 


HEGEL. 


225 


versal is therefore realized in this totality of individual 
life. For the nature of the universal is the nature of the 
self, and the self is a world of organically interrelated 
selves, moments of the infinite organism, phases of its 
infinity. 1 

One could not mention a formula more characteristic 
of the Hegelian doctrine than this account of what Hegel 
calls the “ concrete universal,” which constructs, brings 
forth, in the endless play and toil of rationality, its own 
“ differences,” the individuals of the world of experience. 
It is this which for him explains how in the church or in 
the state we, the individuals, find ourselves “members 
one of another.” It is this that shows us the whole world 
as an organism. Wherever this sort of universality is not 
found, as is the case in the world of uncomprehended 
sense-facts, where, for instance, only men as individuals 
seem to exist, and man appears to us as a dead abstrac¬ 
tion, we are not dealing with the world of truth. The 
first sign that we are dealing with the truth itself is our 
success in discovering an organic connection amongst 
things. For organism is selfhood or personality viewed 
in its outward manifestation. There is, then, for Hegel a 
lower form of thinking that reaches only a Verstandes - 
Allgemeinheit Such thinking finds itself in the presence 
of individual facts, and regards the universal either as a 
bare abstraction, or else as present only in each individual 
as its inner and separate nature. For such thinking the 
only concrete truth is the world of individual things as 
such. But the deeper insight into the world is revealed 

1 Hegel’s first published exemplification of this doctrine was in 
the before-mentioned theory of the Allgemeinheit des Bewusstseins, as 
expounded in the Phdnomenologie. In the Logik the doctrine receives 
a most intricate and elaborate exposition. It is in later writings made 
the basis for Hegel’s doctrine of the state and of the religious con¬ 
sciousness, although it was almost certainly reached, in the first place, 
through an examination of just these instances. For further citat'ons 
see Appendix C. 


226 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


to us through a reflection upon the nature of self-con¬ 
sciousness, wherein the universal, or self, is the organic 
total of the facts of consciousness, which exist not save as 
related to one another, and to this universal. The true 
Universal of Hegel’s theory is, then, what our own Shelley 
so well described when he told us in the “ Prometheus ” 
of the 

“ One undivided Soul of many a soul 
Whose nature is its own divine control, 

Where^ll things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.” 1 

Of the philosophy of nature (Hegel’s most unfinished 
and weakest undertaking), and of the philosophy of spirit 
(whereof the foregoing has already contained a sugges¬ 
tion), it is not our office here to treat. These matters be¬ 
long in their fullness to technical expositions, upon whose 
province I have now doubtless too much trespassed. 

And herewith I must close this account. It will, per¬ 
haps, be already obvious to you all that there is a great 
deal in this Hegelian analysis of self-consciousness that 
seems to me of permanent and obvious value. As to the 
finality of the philosophical doctrine as a whole, that is 
another matter not here to be discussed. Still, I may, 
perhaps, do well, in closing, to suggest this one thought: 
People usually call Hegel a cold-hearted system-maker, 
who reduced all our emotions to purely abstract logical 
terms, and conceived his absolute solely as an incarnation 
of dead thought. I, on the contrary, call him one who 
knew marvelously well, with all his coldness, the secret 
of human passion, and who, therefore, described, as few 
others have done, the paradoxes, the problems, and the 
glories of the spiritual life. His great philosophical and 
systematic error lay, not in introducing logic into passion, 

1 The Hegelian theory of universals is well sketched in Principal 
Caird’s Philosophy of Religion, pp. 229-232. See, also, p. 241, where 
Principal Caird illustrates the true universal by the example of a 
family with many members. 


HEGEL. 


227 




but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic; 
so that you in vain endeavor to get satisfaction from 
Hegel’s treatment of outer nature, of science, of mathe¬ 
matics, or of any coldly theoretical topic. About all these 
things he is immensely suggestive, but never final. His 
system, as system, has crumbled, but his vital comprehen¬ 
sion of our life remains forever. 


LECTURE VIII. 


SCHOPENHAUER. 

I need hardly remark in the presence of this audience 
that the name of Schopenhauer is better known to most 
general readers, in our day, than is that of any other mod¬ 
ern Continental metaphysician, except Kant. The reputed 
heretic has in this field the reward of his dangerous repu¬ 
tation, and I scarcely know whether to fear or to rejoice, 
as I now approach the treatment of so noteworthy and 
significant a man, at the position in which Schopenhauer’s 
fame puts his expositor. In one respect, of course, my 
task is rendered easier by all this popular repute of my 
hero. Of his doctrine most of us have heard a good deal, 
and many of us may have followed to a considerable ex¬ 
tent his reasoning; at all events we have become ac¬ 
quainted, at least by hearsay, with the fact that his out¬ 
come was something called Pessimism. And thus, in 
dealing with him, I am not voyaging with you in seas un¬ 
known to all but the technical students of philosophy, as 
was last time the case, when I told you of Hegel. On the 
other hand, the kind of reputation that his writings have 
very naturally won is decidedly against me when I under¬ 
take to treat him with genuinely philosophical fairness. It 
is so much easier to be edifying than to face with courage 
certain serious and decidedly tragic realities! Let me be 
frank with you, then, at the outset about my difficulty. It 
is, plainly stated, simply this: You have heard that 
Schopenhauer is a pessimist. You, meanwhile, are surely 
for the most part no pessimists. Therefore, as we ap¬ 
proach Schopenhauer, you want me, in your secret hearts, 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


229 


if not in your expressed wishes, to refute Schopenhauer. 
Now refutation is, as I have already tried to maintain, a 
thing of only very moderate service in the study of phi¬ 
losophy. We may refute a great thinker’s accidental mis- 
judgments; we can seldom refute his deeper insights. 
And as I must forthwith assure you, and shall very soon 
show you, Schopenhauer’s pessimism is actually expres¬ 
sive of a very deep insight into life. This insight is in¬ 
deed not a final one. We must transcend it. But surely 
you would justly discover me in a very unphilosophical, and 
in fact very unworthily self-contradictory, attitude if now, 
after all these successive efforts to show you a continuity 
and a common body of truth in the modern philosophers, 
I should suddenly, at this point of my discourse, assume 
the airs of a champion of the faith against the infidels, 
and should fall to hewing and hacking at Schopenhauer 
with genuinely crusading zeal. In fact it is not my call¬ 
ing to do anything of the sort. I always admire the cru¬ 
saders, but my admiration is due rather to their enthusi¬ 
asm than to their philosophical many-sidedness ; rather to 
the vitality of their faith than to the universality of their 
comprehension. I fear that if I should try to join my¬ 
self unto them they would not accept me without reserve. 
I cannot therefore treat Schopenhauer as a crusadei* would 
treat him. He is to me a philosopher of considerable 
dignity, whom we could ill spare from the roll of modern 
thinkers; whom I do not by any means follow as disciple, 
but to whom I owe, in common with other philosophical 
students, a great deal, for his skillful analysis and for his 
fearlessly clear assertion of his own significant tempera¬ 
ment. 

I. 

But as to pessimism itself, Schopenhauer’s famous doc¬ 
trine, as to this terrible view that life is through and 
through tragic and evil, what is my attitude towards that ? 
I must, you will probably say, either accept it, and then 


230 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


must avow it in manly fashion, or I must reject it. And 
if I reject it, then I am bound to refute it. My answer 
to the question is not far to seek. As an actual fact I 
do accept, and avow with perfect freedom, what to many 
gentle minds seems, as I am aware, a pessimistic view of 
life; namely, precisely the view that at the last time we 
found Hegel maintaining and expanding into his marvel¬ 
ously ingenious and technical doctrine of what he called 
Negativitat as the very essence of the passionate spirit¬ 
ual existence. The spiritual life is n’t a gentle or an 
easy thing. It is indeed through and through and forever 
paradoxical, earnest, enduring, toilsome ; yes, if you like, 
painfully tragic. Whoever hopes to find it anything else, 
either now or in some far-off heaven, hopes unquestionably 
in vain. If that is pessimism, — and in one sense, namely, 
in the sense in which many tender but thoughtless souls 
have used the phrase, it is pessimism, being opposed to 
the gentle and optimistic hopes of such, — then I am now, 
and always shall be, in that very sense no optimist, but a 
maintainer of the sterner view that life is forever tragic. 
In so far as Schopenhauer has sought to make this plain, 
I follow him unhesitatingly, and honor him for his merci¬ 
lessness. Why I do so I shall try to make plain before 
this lecture is done. In so far, however, as Schopenhauer 
held that the tragedy of life disheartens every spirit that 
has once come to know the truth, I as plainly and abso¬ 
lutely reject so much of his outcome. The world is, on the 
whole, very nearly as tragic as Schopenhauer represents 
it to be. Only spirituality consists in being heroic enough 
to accept the tragedy of existence, and to glory in the 
strength wherewith it is given to the true lords of life to 
conquer this tragedy, and to make their world after all 
divine. The way to meet Schopenhauer’s pessimism is, 
not to refute its assertions, but to grapple practically with 
its truths. And if you do so, you will find as the real 
heart and significance of Schopenhauer’s own gloomy 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


231 


thought, a vital, yes, even a religious assurance, which 
will make you thank God, that, as we tried to suggest by 
a phrase quoted in an earlier lecture, the very ice and 
cold, the very frost and snow, of philosophy praise and 
magnify him forever. In short, my attitude towards pes¬ 
simism is one that, some years ago, in an article written 
for a Harvard College journal, I tried to express in words 
suggested by the then current accusation that too many 
Harvard students of ability were accustomed to pose as 
pessimists. If I quote now my former words, it is only 
because the right bearing towards such matters seems to 
me so simple that when I try to express it, I am troubled 
with a poverty of phrases, and have to fall back on oft 
repeated formulae, for which perhaps some defiant inter¬ 
jection, hurled into the face of our common enemy, namely, 
the inner spiritual sluggishness wherewith a man is so 
easily beset, would be the best embodiment. But, at all 
events, these were my poor words: — 

44 One hears nowadays, very often, of youthful pessi¬ 
mism, prevalent, for instance, among certain clever college 
students. When I hear of these things, I do not always 
regret them. On the contrary, I think that the best man 
is the one who can see the truth of pessimism, can ab¬ 
sorb and transcend that truth, and can be nevertheless an 
optimist, not by virtue of his failure to recognize the evil 
of life, but by virtue of his readiness to take part in the 
struggle against this evil. Therefore, I am often glad 
when I hear of this spread of pessimistic ideas among 
studious but undeveloped youth. For, I say to myself, if 
these men are brave men, their sense of the evil that hin¬ 
ders our human life will some day arouse them to fight this 
evil in dead earnest, while if they are not brave men, opti¬ 
mism can be of no service to cowards. But in any case I 
like to suggest to such brave and pessimistic youth where 
the solution of their problem must lie. It surely cannot 
lie in any romantic dream of a pure and innocent world, 


232 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


far off somewhere, in the future, in heaven or in the isles 
of the blessed. These things are not for us. We are born 
for the world of manly business, and if we are worthy of 
our destiny, we may possibly have some good part in the 
wars of the Lord. For nothing better have we any right 
to hope, and for an honest man that is enough.” 

If these words which I have quoted seem to you rather 
unfeeling in their hardness, I beseech you to wait until I 
am done, not merely with to-day’s exposition of Schopen¬ 
hauer, but with my whole course, before you judge them. 
As for living up to this obvious, but tremendously difficult 
kind of courage, of course you will not need to hear me 
say that a student of philosophy finds that quite as hard 
a task as do any of his neighbors. I am only stating the 
doctrine. A coward is not an admirable person, but it 
is only too easy to be one. 

Thus, then, forsaking for the moment my position as 
chronicler, I try to tell you, in this wholly unoriginal fash¬ 
ion, what, to be sure, has always been the creed of brave 
men ever since our remote ancestors, or their cousins, 
struggled with the climate of the glacial period. And 
having thus freed my mind and defined my attitude to¬ 
wards pessimism, I can venture to assume once more the 
position of the historical student, and to set forth some¬ 
thing of Schopenhauer’s contribution to the great philo¬ 
sophic task of modern humanity. 


ii. 

The general character and worth of this contribution I 
must first describe, and in doing so I shall follow in the 
main the view of a recent German writer on the history of 
philosophy, namely, Professor Windelband, to whose well- 
known book, “ Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie,” 
these lectures have owed throughout not a little. Modern 
idealism, as it developed since Kant, was from the first an 
effort to discover the rationality of our world through an 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


233 


analysis of tlie nature of consciousness. Such analysis 
was the problem that Kant bequeathed to his successors. 
For Kant showed that we know the world only in terms 
of consciousness and its laws, so that the understanding 
is the creator of the show nature that stands before our 
senses. Fichte tried to solve this Kantian problem by 
proving that it is the moral law which is the very heart 
and essence of our consciousness, so that our seemingly 
outer world is there as a means whereby we can do our 
work and win our deeper self. The romanticists, how¬ 
ever, felt that consciousness was no more exhaustively 
expressed by the moral will than by any other humane in¬ 
terest of the self. Thus, there entered into philosophy a 
reign of caprice, to which even Hegel did not put an end. 
Once understand the nature of this caprice, and you will 
see the place which Schopenhauer’s system is to hold in 
the development of doctrine. 

Were it not, says all idealism, were it not that I am 
just such a conscious being as I am, my world would be 
a wholly different one from the world that I see. To 
know the real nature of my world I must therefore un¬ 
derstand my own deeper self. Is there anything fixed, 
stable, necessary, about my nature? If so, then I am 
necessarily forced to exist in just this sort of world. But 
if I am essentially of no one fixed and necessary nature, 
then at any moment my whole world might alter. The 
ordinary realism of common sense does n’t fear this, 
does n’t feel the necessity of an ultimate appeal to any¬ 
thing stable or fixed about me as the real source of truth, 
because ordinary realism holds that the truth is there 
beyond me, as something knowable to all people of good 
intelligence, in the hard and fast matter of the world of 
sense. There is the moon yonder. For ordinary realism, 
the moon is as permanent as nature makes it, and stays 
there whether any one knows it or not. Hence, in order 
to ask whether there is anything stable about the world, 


234 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


ordinary realism has to put no questions to the inner life. 
But the very essence of idealism it is to say, My moon, 
the moon that I see and talk about, the moon of my own 
world of outer show and of empirical knowledge, is just 
one of my ideas. You see the same moon only in so far 
as in your world, in your inner life, there is a fact truly 
corresponding to what I call the moon in my inner life. 
Therefore, if you and I are to continue to see the same 
moon, that must be because both of us have some common 
and necessary deeper nature, a true and abiding oneness 
of spirit, that forces us to agree in this respect as to our 
inner life. Hence, not the abiding matter of the moon, 
as something that should stay there when you and I had 
both departed, but some common law that holds for your 
spirit as for mine, is the basis for the seeming perma¬ 
nence and common outer reality of the moon for us. 
The moon has the same sort of objective existence that, 
for instance, at this moment, my lecture has. The lec¬ 
ture exists as thought in me, and as experience in you. 
But because of a certain community of our thoughts, we 
all of us have the same lecture more or less present to us. 
We all of us, moreover, regard the lecture as an outer 
reality, and we therefore seem to be as much in presence 
of an objective fact as if the lecture were made of real 
atoms, instead of ideas. Or again, for the idealistic view, 
the existence of the events in matter, or of any other ex¬ 
ternal events, resembles the existence at any instant of the 
price of a stock in the stock-market, or the credit of a great 
firm in the commercial world. A consensus of the thoughts 
of the buyer and sellers exists at any moment, which, how¬ 
ever well founded, or again however arbitrary and chan¬ 
ging this consensus may be, is expressed for the instant as 
if it were a hard and fast material thing in a genuinely 
outer world. In fact, prices and credits are ideas, and 
exist in the show-world of market values and of commer¬ 
cial securities, being but the projections of the various 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


235 


ideas of people as these at any moment agree to express 
themselves. Even so, then, just as this lecture is at this 
instant a fact because our minds agree in making it so, 
and just as the price of the stock, or the credit of the 
great firm, is an often irresistible fact, to which the indi¬ 
vidual dealer must yield in so far as his own financial 
might is n’t equal to altering it, even so the moon yonder 
is likewise for us all an outer fact, because we are forced 
to agree in regarding it as outer. But our agreement 
itself is a fact of the deeper life of our common selfhood. 

Such common ideas being, then, the idealist’s true 
world, his problem it is to determine whether there is any 
deeper and impersonally human necessity which guaran¬ 
tees that our ideas shall thus in any wise agree. This 
necessity must be sought, if at all, in our own hidden na¬ 
ture. Constructive idealists have always sought it in that 
common band of rationality which, as they conceive, so 
links us all together that we are organically related parts 
or moments of one deeper self. This self, which shall ex¬ 
press itself in you, in me, in everybody, is to link your 
experience to mine in such fashion that we shall see 
related outer worlds. Because this self in you constructs 
a show-space in three dimensions, and does a similar thing 
for me, therefore we alike look out into the depths of 
space, where the same stars seem to glitter for us all. 
Unity, fixity, assurance, we get, if we get such prizes at 
all, only by virtue of that rational and spiritual unity that 
is beneath our lives. Can the philosopher find the true 
heart and essence of this our common selfhood? If he 
can, then idealism becomes a system. We are, then, all in 
one world of truth. The outer world is indeed show, but 
no illusion ; and our life has an organic fixity, a lawful 
completeness about it, such as every philosophy longs for. 

But now, unfortunately, when idealists set about dedu¬ 
cing this unity and consistency of the spiritual world from 
some deep inner principle, their reflection always leaves us 


236 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


in one great respect dissatisfied. We very certainly, 
namely, can never deduce from the idea of our common 
spirituality the idea of any particular sense thing, such as 
the moon. Or, to repeat one of my former illustrations, 
idealists can’t tell us why we are spiritually or rationally 
bound all alike to perceive a starry world, wherein there 
shall be a belt of telescopic asteroids between the orbits of 
Mars and Jupiter. Such facts idealists get, like their 
neighbors, from daily experience or from science. Ideal¬ 
ists may say in general, as Fichte said, that the moral law 
needs a world of outer experience as the material for its 
embodiment. They cannot show why just this material 
is needed. There remains, then, an element of brute fact, 
a residuum, if you choose, of spiritual caprice, in their 
world of the all-embracing self. Perhaps we have, as 
they say, the one deeper self in common, perhaps this 
deeper self has rational grounds for building in us all 
alike just this world of sense, of moons, of asteroids, oi 
comets, of jelly-fish, and of all the rest, only there is still, 
from our finite point of view, a vast element of at least 
apparent caprice about the entire universe of the spirit as 
thus built. And all idealists have to recognize this fact 
of the seeming capriciousness of the external order. The 
universal reason builds the world, says idealism ; but then 
does not the universal reason seem to build many irra¬ 
tional facts into its world? You see then the difficulty. 
Our common spiritual nature is to guarantee the truth of 
our common experience. Unless this nature has some 
hard and fast necessity in it, of which we can form an 
adequate conception, there is no satisfaction in our philo¬ 
sophy. But when we try to develop this idea of the uni¬ 
versal necessity of the world of our common selfhood, we 
come once more against an element of the most stubborn 
caprice. Idealism seems to be an insight as suggestive 
and inspiring as it is limited. The nature of this divine 
self has something seemingly irrational about it. Our 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


237 


attempted account of the world in terms of the universal 
reason therefore remains so far a mere programme, a pos¬ 
tulate, almost a dogma. And yet dogmas were just what 
our philosophy had all along been trying to reduce and to 
rationalize. 

In view of this common perplexity of all the idealistic 
systems, there were certain to arise, upon the historical 
basis of the Kantian theory, philosophies that not only 
accepted the perplexity, but that magnified it, that re¬ 
ferred it to the very nature of the quasi-mental reality 
behind the world of sense, and that declared: “ Deeper 
than reason, in this world of the ideal existence, is the 
caprice which once for all expresses itself in the wealth 
of nature’s facts.” Of such systems Schopenhauer’s phi¬ 
losophy is the classic representative. Not that Schopen¬ 
hauer was in this general tendency alone. Windelband 
very properly classes under the same head Schelling’s 
later theologico-philosophical speculations (not studied in 
these lectures) along with two or three other doctrines. 
Windelband calls them all by the common name Irratio- 
nalismus. A doctrine of this sort, upon a Kantian basis, 
must run somewhat as follows: The world as we see it 
exists only in our ideas. We all have a common outer 
show-world because we all possess a common deeper 
nature, wherein we are one. You are essentially the 
same ultimate being that I am. Otherwise we should not 
have in common this outer projected world of seeming 
sea waves, star clusters, and city streets. For, as ideas, 
those things have no outer basis. As common to us all, 
they must have a deep inner basis. Yet this their basis 
can’t be anything ultimately and universally rational. 
For in so far as we actually have reason in common, 
we think necessary, clearly coherent, exactly interrelated 
groups of ideas, such, for instance, as the multiplication 
table. But about the star clusters and the sea waves 
there is no such ultimate rational unity and coherency. 


238 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Natural laws only bind such things together, in the fash¬ 
ion that Kant so prettily explained, in case the pheno¬ 
mena to be bound together are once for all there. Why, 
given sea waves and star clusters and city streets, we 
should be bound to think them as in some sort of inter¬ 
connection, Kant has told us. Only no such laws of 
nature can explain why there should be the phenomena 
there that are thus to conform to law. This is capricious. 
This is due to our common but irrational nature. The 
world of the true idealism is n’t so much the world of the 
rational and divine self, as it is the world of the deep 
unreason that lies at the very basis of all of our natures, 
of all our common selfhood. Why should there be any 
world at all for us? Is n’t it just because we are all actu¬ 
ally minded to see one ? And is n’t this being minded to 
see a world as ultimately and brutally unreasonable a 
fact as you could name ? Let us find for this fact, then, a 
name not so exalted as Fichte’s high-sounding speech 
would love. Let us call this ultimate nature of ours, 
which forces us all alike to see a world of phenomena in 
the show forms of space and time, simply our own deep 
common Will. Let us drop the divine name for it. Will, 
merely as such, is n’t precisely a rational thing; it’s 
capricious. It wills because it does will; and if it wills 
in us all to be of such nature as to see just these stars and 
houses, then see them we must, and there is the end of it. 

Thus stated, you have an irrationalism on an idealistic 
basis, a doctrine that may be summed up in three propo¬ 
sitions ; — 

1. The world has existence only as we see it. 

2. What facts we are to see can only be learned from 
experience, and cannot be found a 'priori through any 
absurd transcendental deductions of the so-called essence 
of any absolute spirit. 

3. The deepest ground, however, for all these seen 
facts, and for the community of our various visible worlds, 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


239 


is the common and single World-Will, which, expressed in 
all of us equally, forces us to see alike, but does so simply 
because this is the particular caprice that it happens to 
have, so that it embodies itself for us and in us as just 
this show-world, rather than any other, because such is its 
fashion of willing. 

The obvious value of such a theory is that it is at once 
idealistic in its analysis of the presuppositions of life, just 
to the direct and irresistible reality of the facts of experi¬ 
ence, and disposed, after all, to go deeper than experience 
in its search for the ultimate truth of the world. Final it 
certainly is not in this form. But it has an obvious 
advantage over the sort of caprice that, as we saw, was 
characteristic of the philosophy of the romantic school. 
Their caprice was the fickleness of private and individual 
choice. For them you can change, as it were, at any 
moment of time, your show-world. For them the man of 
genius makes whatever world he chooses. But for this 
theory of Schopenhauer’s there is but one caprice, and 
that is the caprice of the World-Will itself, which once for 
all has hit upon this particular world of facts in time and 
in space. For us, in our individual capacity, there is no 
further caprice. We are in presence of this world now, 
because we ourselves are embodiments of the world-will. 
We cannot help the fact any longer. Experience is expe¬ 
rience ; fact is fact; the show is going on for us all alike ; 
the world-will has chosen; but it has not chosen at any 
point in time. Hence in the world, as it is in time, there 
is no further caprice, only fact. Time itself is indeed not 
any ultimate reality. Time belongs to the show-world, 
and is there like any other fact or form of things, because 
the world-will fancies such a form for the things of sense. 
But just for this very reason, we, as individuals, are just 
where we are, and the realities of sense and of science, 
although susceptible of so deep and mysterious an inter¬ 
pretation as this, are as inevitable and as objective for us 


240 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


as ever the most naive and unreflectively superficial real¬ 
ism made them. As against such realism our doctrine 
possesses depth, philosophical keenness of analysis, ideal¬ 
istic insight. As against the romantic idealism, our doc¬ 
trine has the advantage of objectivity and fixity. Just 
because our common temporal existence is part of the 
caprice of the World-Will, this temporal existence itself 
has for us individuals reality and fixity. 

So much for the theoretical side of our author’s doc¬ 
trine. On the practical side, in respect, namely, of his 
pessimism, we shall find Schopenhauer in a very interest¬ 
ing historical relation to Hegel. In fact, as we shall 
learn, our author’s pessimism is but another aspect of the 
same insight into the paradoxical logic of passion which 
we have discovered at the heart of Hegel’s doctrine. It 
is true that Schopenhauer’s World-Will, this blind power 
that, according to him, embodies itself in our universe, 
appears in his account, at first, as something that might 
be said to possess passion without logic. Yet this first 
view of the World-Will soon turns out to be inadequate. 
The very caprice of the terrible principle is seen, as we go 
on, to involve a sort of secondary rationality, a logic, fatal 
and gloomy, as well as deeply paradoxical, but still none 
the less truly rational for all that. Schopenhauer’s worlds 
is, in fact, tragic in much the same sense as Hegel’s. 
Only, for Schopenhauer the tragedy is hopeless, blind, 
undivine ; while for Hegel it is the divine tragedy of the 
much-tried Logos, whose joy is above all the sorrows of 
his world. Were this difference between these two think¬ 
ers merely one of personal and speculative opinion, it 
might have little significance. But since it involves, as 
we shall find, one of the most truly vital problems of our 
modern life, one which meets us at every step in our liter¬ 
ature and in our ethical controversies, we shall find it well 
worth our while to study the contrast more closely. First, 
then, here, let us see something of the man Schopenhauer, 
and afterwards we may estimate the doctrine. 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


241 


III. 

Arthur Schopenhauer, born in 1788, was probably 
descended, on the father’s side, from a Dutch family. 
He was the son of a wealthy merchant of Danzig. His 
mother, the once noted Johanna Schopenhauer, brilliant 
novelist, and in her later years ambitious hostess in the 
literary circles at Weimar, had married, as she very 
frankly tells us, not from love, but for position. On both 
sides, Schopenhauer’s ancestry was somewhat burdened, as 
we should say, in respect of nerves, although this fact is 
decidedly more marked on the father’s side. The philo¬ 
sopher’s paternal grandmother was declared insane during 
the latter years of her life; and of his uncles, on the 
same side, one was idiotic, and one was given to excesses 
of the neurotic type. Schopenhauer’s father, a busy and 
uncommonly intelligent man, many-sided and successful, 
still suffered, towards the last, from the family trouble. 
He showed at fifty-eight years of age occasional but acute 
symptoms of an excited form of derangement, lost, mean¬ 
while, his memory for well-known persons, and very soon 
died under mysterious circumstances that strongly indicated 
an insane suicide. Johanna herself war) indeed personally 
quite free from noteworthy nervous defect, unless lieart- 
lessness be reckoned as such. The philosopher himself, 
as is well known, lived in excellent general health until 
past seventy, dying in 1860, of a cause having no appar¬ 
ent relation to nervous difficulties. Still, especially in 
youth, he was vexed by his hereditary burden enough to 
enable us without question to associate his pessimism in 
some measure with his temperament. Several neuras¬ 
thenic symptoms are reported, showing themselves in spo¬ 
radic but decided forms, — night-terrors, of a known 
pathological type; causeless depressions; a persistent dread 
of possible misfortunes; a complaining and frequently 
unbearable ill humor, with attendant crises of violent tern- 


242 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

per. A troublesome and slowly growing deafness, similar 
to one manifest in his father, is referred to the same 
cause. Against these stood always a very fine general 
constitution and a rather over-anxiously guarded fashion 
of life. The question suggested by all these facts, —- the 
well-known question whether Schopenhauer’s pessimism 
was mainly due to mere morbidness of temperament, was 
in short mere Stimmungspessimismus, — is not so easy to 
decide as some of his critics fancy. In fact, the man was 
unquestionably incapable of a permanently cheerful view 
of life, — was a born outcast, doomed to hide and to 
be lonely. Unquestionably, moreover, he was given to 
pettiness in the minor relations of life, was vain, uncom¬ 
panionable, and bitter. But then, many clever men have 
had all these burdens to bear, without being able to see 
the tragedy of life as wisely and deeply as Schopenhauer 
saw it. He would have said of his own unhappy temper 
very much what he once said of the crimes of Napoleon’s 
career, namely, that there are conditions which make 
manifest the latent evil of human selfishness, the dangers 
of the restless will that is in us all alike, better than do 
other conditions, but which do not therefore create their 
latent evil. It will not do in any case to state the case 
against Schopenhauer’s pessimism in such shallow fashion 
as to make it appear that, whilst all pessimism is mere 
pettiness, all optimism is prima facie noble-mindedness. 
Optimists also can be selfish and even intolerable. In 
fine, then, I am disposed to say, as a matter of mere his¬ 
torical judgment, that Schopenhauer’s nervous burdens 
unquestionably opened his eyes to the particular aspect of 
life which he found so tragic, but that meanwhile the fact 
of such burdens is of positively no service to us in form¬ 
ing our estimate of the ultimate significance of our philo¬ 
sopher’s insight, — an insight which, for my part, I find 
as deep as it was partial. 

The Italian psychologist Lombroso, in his well-known 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


243 


work on the relations of genius and insanity, makes use 
of course of Schopenhauer in his catalogue of pathological 
geniuses. The only value which such observations have, 
in the present chaotic condition of our knowledge upon the 
subject, is to remind us that we cannot dispose of a man’s 
intellectual rank, or of his doctrine, by merely observing 
that he was weighted with morbid tendencies of mind. 
Genius has often, although by no means always, a back¬ 
ground of a pathological sort; while, on the other hand, 
the nervously burdened, whether geniuses or not, actually 
do a great part of the world’s work and of the world’s 
thinking, and may be all the wiser by reason of the depth 
of their nervous experiences. Specially interesting, how¬ 
ever, in Schopenhauer’s case, is the relation of contrast 
between the peevishness of his private temper and the 
self-controlled calm and clearness of his literary style. 
To such a man intellectual work is a blessed relief from 
the storms of trivial but violent emotion. His reflective 
thought stands off, as it were, on one side, and surveys 
with a melancholy freedom his daily life of care and of 
bondage. His thinking rejoices in the wondrous craft 
whereby it has outwitted passion. His reflection, there¬ 
fore, throughout, is a negative self-criticism, a sort of 
reductio ad absurdum of the tempestuous natural man. 
It does not embody the peevishness of this natural man, 
but rather scorns the vanity of his unwisdom. As Scho¬ 
penhauer himself says: “ Since all grief, because it is a 
mortification, a call to resignation, has in it the possi¬ 
bility of rendering one holy, therefore it is that great 
sorrow, deep pangs, arouse in us a certain reverence for 
the sufferer; but the sufferer becomes wholly venerable 
only when, seeing his whole life as one chain of sorrow, 
he yet does not dwell on the enchainment of circum¬ 
stances that brought grief to just his life; . . . for then 
he would still be longing for life, only under other condi¬ 
tions. But he is truly venerable only when his look is 


244 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


turned from the petty to the universal; when he becomes, 
as it were, a genius in respect of ethical insight; when 
he sees a thousand cases in one, so that life seen as one 
whole . . . moves him to resignation. ... A very noble 
character,” continues Schopenhauer, “ we always conceive 
with a certain tinge of melancholy in it, — a melancholy 
that is anything but a continual peevishness in view of 
the daily vexations of life (for such peevishness is an 
ignoble trait, and arouses suspicions of maliciousness), 
but rather a melancholy that comes from an insight into 
the vanity of all joys, and the sorrowfulness of all living, 
not alone of one’s own fortune.” Thus, as we see, Scho¬ 
penhauer’s philosophy is not founded upon any summing 
up of the malicious judgments of his natural peevishness, 
but is an expression of a calm and relatively external 
survey and confession of his temperament in its whole¬ 
ness. This it is that is expressed in the lucidity of his 
style, and that gives permanent value to his insight. The 
strong opposition between will and contemplation is one 
of the chief features of his doctrine. 

As for this style in itself, it suggested Jean Paul’s 
famous characterization of the first edition of Schopen¬ 
hauer’s “Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ” : “A book of 
philosophical genius, bold, many-sided, full of skill and 
depth, — but of a depth often hopeless and bottomless, 
akin to that melancholy lake in Norway, in whose deep 
waters, beneath the steep rock-walls, one never sees the 
sun, but only the stars reflected ; and no bird and no wave 
ever flies over its surface.” Just this calm of Schopen¬ 
hauer’s intellect is the characteristic thing about his writ¬ 
ing ; and no one who knows the highly intellectual and 
reflective type of the nervously burdened genius will fail 
to comprehend the meaning of the contrast between the 
man’s peevishness, which tortured him, and his thinking, 
wherein he found rest. More cheerful spirits may think 
and will in the same moment, may reflect with vigorous 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


245 


vitality and work with keen reflection. But for men of 
Schopenhauer’s type there is a profound contrast between 
their contemplative and their passionate life, precisely the 
same contrast that the ascetic mystics, with whom, once 
more, like Spinoza, Schopenhauer as philosopher had 
many things in common, have always loved to dwell upon 
and to exaggerate. Do you give yourself over to passion ? 
Then, as they will have it, you may he clever, well in¬ 
formed, ingenious; in short, as all the ascetic mystics 
would say, you may be as wily as you are worldly; but 
through it all you will be essentially ignorant, thought¬ 
less, irrational. Do you attain the true enlightenment, 
even for a moment ? Then you stand aside from passion ; 
its whirlwind goes by, and you remain undisturbed; your 
thought, to use an old comparison that was a favorite of 
Schopenhauer’s, pierces through passion as the sunlight 
through the wind. You see it all, but it moves you not. 

Such mysticism is essentially pessimistic ; we find it so 
even in Spinoza, or in the “ Imitation of Christ; ” only, 
in the “ Imitation,” contemplation has the glory of God 
to turn to above and beyond the storm of sense and of 
vanity. A formula for Schopenhauer is that his pessi¬ 
mism is simply the doctrine of the “ Imitation ” with the 
glory of God omitted; but as the glory of God in the 
latter book is described in purely abstract, mystical, and 
essentially unreal terms, one may see at once that the road 
from the mediaeval mystic to Schopenhauer’s outcome is 
not so long as some people imagine. “I saw in my 
dream,” says Bunyan, at the end of his “ Pilgrim’s Pro¬ 
gress,” when the angels carry off poor Ignorance to the 
pit, — “I saw in my dream that there was a way to 
the bottomless pit from the very gate of Heaven, as well 
as from the City of Destruction.” Now, Schopenhauer’s 
mission it was to explore this highly interesting way with 
considerable speculative skill. The mystic who forsakes 
the world because of its vanity finds his comfort in a 


246 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY - . 


dream of something called the divine perfection, — some¬ 
thing pure, abstract, extra-mundane. He comes on “ that 
which is,” and catches, like Tennyson in the famous 
night vision on the lawn, in the In Memoriam,” “ the 
deep pulsation of the world.” Only by and by morning 
comes. Your n^stic must awake; his vision must van¬ 
ish, “ stricken through with doubt.” Tennyson seems to 
have endured the waking better than others. But, gener¬ 
ally speaking, the pessimist of Schopenhauer’s type is 
simply the mystic of the type of the “ Imitation,” at the 
moment when he has awakened from the false glory of 
this religious intoxication. 

The events of our hero’s life may be briefly disposed of. 
His father took or sent him on long travels during his 
early youth, made him well acquainted with both French 
and English, and insisted that he should in due time 
learn the mercantile business, and train himself to be a 
busy, intelligent, and many-sided man of the world. 
Scholarship and the university formed no part in the 
father’s plans. The boy spent also considerable time on 
his father’s country estate, loved nature, but was always 
a lonely child. As youth waxed, moodiness tormented 
him ; he already showed also the metaphysical turn. His 
father’s death, in 1805, left him free to follow his own 
plans. He forsook the hated counting-house, where he 
had already set about his work, and began to study for 
the university; making rapid progress in Latin, quarrel¬ 
ling with his elders, and writing rhetorically gloomy let¬ 
ters to his mother, who had now entered on her Weimar 
career. The son’s native pessimism was still far, of 
course, from the later philosophical formulation, but he 
already perceived that one great evil about the world is 
its endless change, which dooms all ideal interests and 
moods to alteration and defeat. “ Everything,” he writes 
to his mother, “ is washed away in time’s stream. The 
minutes, the numberless atoms of pettiness into which 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


247 


every deed is dissolved, are the worms that gnaw at 
everything great and noble, to destroy it.” His mother 
found this sort of thing rather tedious, and especially in¬ 
consistent with her son’s social success as an occasional 
inmate of her house at Weimar. There already a most 
brilliant company often gathered, Goethe at the head. A 
youth of twenty or thereabouts could not add grace to 
such a scene so long as he could talk of nothing but time 
and worms. She wrote him plainly, being a woman as 
clear-headed as she was charming: “ When you get older, 
dear Arthur, and see things more clearly, perhaps we 
shall agree better. Till then let us see that our thousand 
little quarrels shall not hunt love out of our hearts. To 
that end we must keep well apart. You have your lodg¬ 
ings ; as for my house, whenever you come you are a 
guest, well received, of course, only you must n’t interfere. 
I can’t bear objections. Days when I receive, you may 
take supper with me, if you ’ll only be so good as to re¬ 
frain from your painful disputations, which make me 
angry, too, and from all your lamentations over the stupid 
world and the sorrows of mankind; for all that always 
gives me a bad night and horrid dreams, and I do so like 
a sound sleep.” 

In 1809, Schopenhauer began his university studies at 
Gottingen, devoted himself to Kant and Plato, and rap¬ 
idly acquired the type of erudition which he kept to the 
end, an erudition vast rather than technical, the learning 
of one who saw swiftly rather than studied exhaustively, 
remembered rather than systematized, enjoyed manifold 
labors rather than professional completeness. He was 
always a marvelous reader, of wide literary sympathies, 
especially fond of the satirists, the mystics, and the keen 
observers of all ages. For the processes of the exact 
sciences he had a poor comprehension; for natural phe¬ 
nomena of a suggestive sort his eye was always very wide 
open; he longed to catch the restless World-Will in the 


248 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


very act of its struggle ancl sorrow. He loved books 
of travel, energetic stories, strongly written historical 
sketches, tragic as well as satirical dramas, and books of 
well-described natural history. In nature itself, he was 
very fond of observing flowers, while, after his fashion, 
he loved animals passionately. They show the will naked, 
in all its naive cruelty, guilt, and innocence. 

Edifying literature of all but the purely mystical type, 
most systematic schemes of constructive thought, all 
merely sentimental poetry, and above all such moralizing 
poetry as Schiller’s “ Don Carlos,” he in general bitterly 
despised. These things seemed to him to hover above 
life. He wanted to contemplate the longing of life in 
itself. His critical and historical judgments are deep and 
yet wayward. He is once more on the lookout for types, 
not for connections ; he had, for so learned a man, a poor 
eye for detecting unscholarly and fantastic theories, and 
frequently accepts such when they relate to topics beyond 
his immediate control. His literary sense was after all 
his best safeguard in scholarship. Here his fine contem¬ 
plative intellect guided him. He could not make a bad 
blunder as to a purely linguistic question ; but where his 
taste and instinct for the immediate inner life of things 
and of people were unable to guide him, he wandered too 
often in the dark. On all matters of learning his judg¬ 
ment remains, therefore, largely that of the sensitive man 
of the world. His sense of humor was of the keenest. 
The will is once for all as comic in its irrationalities as it 
is deep in its unrest. A distinguishing feature of his style 
is due to this wide reading, namely, his skill in metaphor 
and in other forms of comparison. In this respect he 
rivals those wonderful masters of comparison, the Hindoo 
metaphysicians, whom he knew through translations, and 
admired much. One further trait may yet be mentioned 
as pervading his study and his whole view of life. He 
was an intense admirer of the English temperament, just 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


249 


as he was an intense hater of many English institutions. 
Not, of course, the English Philistine, but the English 
man of the world, attracted him, by that clear-headedness 
and that freedom from systematic delusions which are so 
characteristic of the stock. To sum all up in a word, the 
maxim of his whole life as a learner was, See and record 
the vital struggles and longings of the will wherever they 
appear. 

Such scholarship as this was ill-fitted to prepare Scho¬ 
penhauer for an academic life. In 1813, he printed his 
dissertation for the doctor’s degree, on the “Fourfold 
Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.” It is his 
most technical book, with least of his genius in it. In 
1818 was published the first edition of his “Welt als 
Wille und Vorstellung.” In 1820, he entered on his work 
as Privat-Docent at the university of Berlin, and imme¬ 
diately made a sufficiently complete academic failure to 
discourage him from any serious effort to continue. Em¬ 
bittered by the indifference with which both his books 
and his attempts as a teacher were received, he gradually 
acquired that intense hatred of all professors of philoso¬ 
phy, and of the whole post-Kantian speculative movement 
in Germany, which he expressed more than once in a 
furious form, and which wholly misled him as to his own 
historical relations. After 1831, he retired to Frankfort- 
on-the-Main, and lived upon his little fortune until the 
close of his life. How he came slowly to be publicly 
known, in spite of the indifference with which academic 
circles treated him; how in old age there gathered round 
him a little circle of well-received flatterers ; how young 
Russians used to come and stare at the wise man ; how he 
loved the attentions of all such people, and better still the 
more intelligent understanding of two or three faithful 
disciples, but best of all his dinner and his dog; how he 
died at last suddenly, when he was quite alone, — are not 
all these things written in the books of modern literary 


250 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


gossip ? I need not dwell upon them further; nor need 
I repeat how Schopenhauer had only to die to acquire 
general fame, until now his name is everywhere a symbol 
for all that is most dark and deep and sad and dangerous 
about the philosophy of our time. Of the pettier inci¬ 
dents of his life, of his quarrels, of his one or two out¬ 
bursts of temper which led to public scandals, of his other 
eccentricities numberless, I have no time to speak further. 


IV. 

Schopenhauer’s principal work, “Die Welt als Wille 
und Vorstellung,” is in form the most artistic philosophi¬ 
cal treatise in existence, if one excepts the best of Plato’s 
“ Dialogues.” In its first edition it was divided into four 
books ; a later edition added in a second volume com¬ 
ments upon all four. Of these books, the first summa¬ 
rizes the Kantian basis of Schopenhauer’s own doctrine. 
The world is, first of all, for each and for all of us, just 
our Vorstellung , our Idea. It is there because and while 
we see it; it consists in its detail of facts of experience. 
These, however, are, for our consciousness, always inter¬ 
preted facts, seen in the sense forms of space and of time, 
and within these forms, perceived through and by virtue 
of our universal form of comprehension, namely, the prin¬ 
ciple of causation. When I experience anything, I in¬ 
evitably seek for a cause in space and in time for this 
experience. When I find such a cause, I localize the 
experience as an event manifesting some change in some¬ 
thing there in space and in time; but these forms of 
space and of time, as well as this principle of causation, 
are all alike simply formal ideas in me. Kant’s great 
service lay, in fact, in his proving the subjectivity, the 
purely mental nature, of such forms. The space and time 
worlds, with all that they contain, exist accordingly for the 
knowing subject. No subject without an object, and no 
object without a subject. I know in so far as there is a 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


251 


world to know; and the world yonder exists in so far as 
I know it. In vain, moreover, would one seek for any 
thing in itself really outside of me as the cause of my 
experiences. For cause is just an idea of mine, useful 
and valid for the events of the show world, but wholly 
inapplicable to anything else. Within experience the law 
of causation is absolute, because such is my fashion of 
thinking experience and of perceiving the localized 
things of sense. But beyond experience what validity, 
what application, can one give to the principle of causa¬ 
tion ? None. There is no cause to be sought beyond my 
own true nature for my own experiences. 

But what is this my nature ? The second book answers 
the question. My nature, you must observe, is something 
very wealthy. It does not indeed cause my experiences, in 
any proper sense ; for cause means only an event that in 
time or in space brings another event to pass; and there 
is nothing that, in time or in space, brings to pass my own 
deepest, timeless, and spaceless nature. As phenomenon 
in time, my body may move or die, as other events deter¬ 
mine ; but my deepest nature is so superior to space and 
time that, as we have just shown, space and time are in 
fact in me, in so far as they are my forms of seeing and 
of knowing. Therefore my true nature neither causes, 
nor is caused; but, as one now sees, it in truth is, com¬ 
prises, embodies itself in, all my world of phenomena. 
Hence you see how wealthy my true nature must be in its 
implications. Yes, in a deeper sense, you also, in so far 
as you truly exist, must have the same deepest nature 
that I have. Only in space and in time do we seem to be 
separate beings. Space and time form, as Schopenhauer 
says, the dividing-principle of things. In an illusory 
way they seem to distinguish us all from one another; 
but abstract space and time, with all their manifold and 
illusory distinctions of places and moments, and the real 
world collapses into one immanent nature of things. 


252 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Since my own deepest nature is beneath and behind the 
time form of the apparent world, it follows that, in an 
essential and deep sense, I am one with all that ever has 
been or that ever will be, either millions of ages ago 
or millions of ages to come. And as for space, there is 
no star so remote but that the same essential nature of 
things which is manifest in that star is also manifest 
in my own body. Space and time are, as the Hindoos 
declared, the veil of Maya or Illusion, wherewith the hid¬ 
den unity of things is covered, so that, through such illu¬ 
sion, the world appears manifold, although it is but one. 

To answer, therefore, the question, What is the nature 
of things? I have only to find what, apart from my 
senses and my thought, is my own deepest essence. And 
of this I have a direct, an indescribable, but an unques¬ 
tionable awareness. My whole inner life is, namely, essen¬ 
tially my will. I long, I desire, I move, I act, I feel, I 
strive, I lament, I assert myself. The common name for 
all this is my will. By will, of course, Schopenhauer does 
not merely mean the highest form of my conscious choice, 
as some people do. He means simply the active nature 
of me, the wanting, longing, self-asserting part. This, in 
truth, as even the romantic idealists felt, lies deeper than 
my intellect, is at the basis of all my seeing and knowing. 
Why do I see and acknowledge the world in space and 
in time ? Why do I believe in matter, or recognize the 
existence of my fellow-men, or exercise my reason ? Is 
not all this just my actual fashion of behavor ? In vain, 
however, do I seek, as the idealists of Fichte’s type often 
pretended to seek, for an ultimate reason why I should 
have this fashion of behavior. That is a mere fact. 
Deeper than reason is the inexplicable caprice of the 
inner life. We want to exist; we long to know; we 
make our world because we are just striving to come into 
being. Our whole life is as ultimate and inexplicable an 
activity as are our particular fashions of loving and of 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


253 


hating. So I am; this is the nature of me, — to strive, to 
long, to will; and I cannot rest in this striving. My life 
is a longing to be somewhere else in life than here, where 
I am. 

Here, then, is the solution of our mystery in so far as 
it can have a solution. The world is the Will. In time 
and space I see only the behavior of phenomena. I never 
get at things in themselves; but I, in my timeless and 
spaceless inner nature, in the very heart, in the very germ, 
of my being, am not a mere outward succession of phe¬ 
nomena. I am a Will, — a will which is not there for the 
sake of something else, but which exists solely because it 
desires to exist. Here is the true thing in itself. The 
whole world, owing to the utter illusoriness of time and 
space, has collapsed into one single and ultimate nature 
of things. This nature, immediately experienced in the 
inner life, is the Will. This Will, then, is that which is so 
wealthy that the whole show world is needed to express 
its caprice. Look, then, on the whole world in its infinite 
complication of living creatures and of material processes. 
These, indeed, are remote enough from your body. Seen 
in space and time, you are a mere fragment in the endless 
world of phenomena, a mere drop in the ocean, a link in 
an endless chain. But look at the whole world otherwise. 
In its inmost life and truth it must be one, for space and 
time are the mere forms in which the one interest of the 
observer is pleased to express itself. Look upon all 
things, then, and it can be said of you as, once more, the 
Hindoos loved to say, “ The life of all these things, — 
That art Thou.” 

Schopenhauer himself was fond of quoting this well- 
known phrase of the Hindoo philosophy as expressing the 
kernel of his own doctrine. New about his philosophy was, 
he felt, the synthesis that he had made of Kant’s thought 
and the Hindoo insight; but with this insight itself he 
essentially agreed. “ The inmost life of things is one, 


254 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

and that life art thou.” This sentence expresses to his 
mind the substance of the true thought about the world. 
Let us, then, quote a paragraph or two from one of the 
Hindoo philosophic classics called the “ Upanishads,” 
much read and loved by Schopenhauer, to illustrate his 
view. In the passage in question a teacher is repre¬ 
sented as in conversation with his pupil, who is also his 
son. 44 4 Bring me,’ says the father, 4 a fruit of yonder 
tree.’ 4 Here it is, O Venerable One.’ ‘Cut it open.’ 
4 It is done.’ 4 What seest thou therein ? ’ 4 1 see, O 

Venerable One, very little seeds.’ 4 Cut one of them 
open.’ 4 It is done, Venerable One.’ 4 What seest thou 
therein?’ 4 Nothing, Venerable One.’ Then spake he: 
4 That fine thing which thou seest not, my well beloved, 
from that fine thing (that life) is, in truth, this mighty 
tree grown. Believe me, my well beloved, what this fine 
(substance) is, of whose essence is all the world, that is 
the Reality, that is the Soul, — That art Thou , O Cve- 
taketu.’ ” 

44 4 This bit of salt, lay it in the (vessel of) water, and 
come again to-morrow to me.’ This did he. Then spake 
(the teacher): 4 Bring me that salt which yesterday even 
thou didst lay in the water.’ He sought it and found it 
not, for it was melted. ‘Taste the water here. How 
tastes it ? ’ 4 Salt.’ 4 Taste it there. How tastes it ? ’ 

4 Salt.’ 4 Leave the vessel and sit at my feet.’ So did 
he, and said, 4 (The salt) is still there.’ Then spake the 
teacher: 4 Verily, so seest thou the truly Existent not in 
bodies, yet is it truly therein. What this fine substance 
is of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, 
that is the Soul, — That art Thou , O Cvetaketu.’ ” 

44 4 Just as, O my well beloved, a man whom they have 
led away out of the land of the Gandharis with eyes blind¬ 
folded, and have loosed him in the wilderness, — just as 
he wanders eastwards or westwards, southwards or north¬ 
wards, because he has been led hither blindfolded and 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


255 


loosed blindfolded, but after some one has taken off the 
blind from his eyes, and has said, “ Yonder lies the land 
of the Gandharis; yonder go,” he, asking the way in vil¬ 
lage after village, instructed and understanding, comes 
home at last to the Gandharis, — even so, too, is the man 
who here in the world has found a teacher; for he knows 
“ to this (world) I belong only until I am delivered; then 
shall I come to my home.” What this fine (substance) 
is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, 
that is the Soul,— That art Thou , O Cvetaketu.’ ” 

Here, one sees, is the Hindoo way of getting at the 
substance. It is also Schopenhauer’s way. Look for the 
substance within, in your own nature. You will not see 
it without. It is the life of your own life, the soul of 
your own soul. When you find it, you will come home 
from the confusing world of sense-things to the heart and 
essence of the world, to the reality. That art Thou . 

Since for Schopenhauer this soul of your soul is the 
capricious inner will, there is no reason to speak of it as 
God or as Spirit; for these words imply rationality and 
conscious intelligence. And intelligence, whose presence 
in the world is merely one of the caprices of this will it¬ 
self, finds itself always in sharp contrast to the will, which 
it can contemplate, but which it can never explain. How¬ 
ever, of contemplation there are various stages, deter¬ 
mined in us phenomenal individuals by the various sizes 
and powers of our purely phenomenal brains. Why any 
intelligence exists at all, and why it is phenomenally as¬ 
sociated with a brain, nobody can explain. The will thus 
likes to express itself. That is the whole story. How¬ 
ever, once given the expression, this intelligence reaches 
its highest perfection in that power to contemplate the 
whole world of the will with a certain supreme and lofty 
calm, which, combined with an accurate insight into the 
truth of the will, is characteristic of the temperament of 
the productive artist. Art is, namely, the embodiment of 


256 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the essence of the will as the contemplative intelligence 
sees it. And to art Schopenhauer devotes his third book. 
The will has certain ultimate fashions of expressing itself, 
certain stages of self-objectification, as Schopenhauer calls 
them. These, in so far as contemplation can seize them, 
are the ultimate types, the Platonic ideas, of things, all 
endlessly exemplified in space and time by individual ob¬ 
jects, but, as types, eternal, time-transcending, immortal. 
They are the ultimate embodiments of passion, the eternal 
forms of longing that exist in our world. Art grasps 
these types and exhibits them. Architecture, for in¬ 
stance, portrays the blind nature-forces, or longings, of 
weight and resistance. Art is, then, the universal appre¬ 
ciation of the essence of the will from the point of view 
of a contemplative onlooker. Art is, therefore, disinter¬ 
ested, embodying passion, but itself not the victim of pas¬ 
sion. Of all the arts, according to Schopenhauer, Music 
most universally and many-sidedly portrays the very es¬ 
sence of the will, the very soul of passion, the very heart 
of this capricious, world-making, and incomprehensible 
inner nature of ours. Hence music is in some respects 
Schopenhauer’s favorite art. Music shows us just what 
the will is, — eternally moving, striving, changing, flying, 
struggling, wandering, returning to itself, and then begin¬ 
ning afresh, — all with no deeper purpose than just life 
in all its endlessness, motion, onward-flying, conflict, full¬ 
ness of power, even though that shall mean fullness of 
sorrow and anguish. Music never rests, never is content; 
repeats its conflicts and wanderings over and over; leads 
them up, indeed, to mighty climaxes, but is great and 
strong never by virtue of abstract ideas, but only by the 
might of the will that it embodies. Listen to these cries 
and strivings, to this infinite wealth of flowing passion, 
to this infinite restlessness, and then reflect, — That art 
Thou ; just that unreposing vigor, longing, majesty, and — 
caprice. 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


257 


Of all Schopenhauer’s theories, except his pessimism 
itself, this theory of art has become the most widely known 
and influential. As he stated it, it was, indeed, evidently 
the notion, not of the systematic student of any art, but 
of the observant amateur of genius and sensibility. It 
lacks the professional tone altogether. Its illustrations 
are chosen whimsically from all sorts of directions. The 
opposition between will and contemplation reaches for the 
first time its height at this point in the system. On one 
side, the world of passion, throbbing, sorrowing, longing, 
hoping, toiling, above all, forever fleeing from the mo¬ 
ment, whatever it be; on the other side, the majesty of 
artistic contemplation, looking in sacred calm upon all 
this world, seeing all things, but itself unmoved. Plainly, 
in this contemplative intellect the will has capriciously 
created for itself a dangerous enemy, who will discover its 
deep irrationality. 

This enemy is none other than that Wagnerian Briin- 
hilde, who is destined to see, through and through, the 
vanity of the world of the will, and who, not indeed with¬ 
out the connivance of the high gods of the will them¬ 
selves, is minded to destroy the whole vain show in one final 
act of resignation. There arise from time to time in the 
world, thinks Schopenhauer, holy men, full of sympathy 
and pity for all their kind, full of a sense of the unity of 
all life, and of the vanity of this our common and endless 
paradox of the finite world. These men are called, in the 
speech of all the religions, saints. Whatever their land 
or creed, their thought is the same. Not the particular 
griefs of life, not the pangs of cold and hunger and of 
disease, not the horrors of the baseness that runs riot in 
humanity, — not these things do they weigh in the balance 
with any sort of precision or particularity, although these 
things, too, they see and pity. No, the source of all these 
griefs, the will itself, its paradox, its contradictory long¬ 
ing to be forever longing, its irrational striving to be for- 


258 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

ever as one that suffers lack, — this they condemn, com« 
passionate, and — resign. They do not strive or cry. 
They simply forsake the will. Life, they say, must be 
evil, for life is desire, and desire is essentially tragic, since 
it flees endlessly and restlessly from all that it has ; makes 
perfection impossible by always despising whatever it hap¬ 
pens to possess, and by longing for more; lives in an eter¬ 
nal wilderness of its own creation ; is tossed fitfully in 
the waves of its own dark ocean of passion; knows no 
peace; finds in itself no outcome, — nothing that can 
finish the longing and the strife. 

And this hopelessly struggling desire, — so the saints 
teach to each one of us in our blindness, — That art Thou . 
The saints pity us all. Their very existence is compas¬ 
sion. They absent them from felicity awhile, that they 
may teach us the way of peace. And this way is what ? 
Suicide ? No, indeed. Schopenhauer quite consistently 
condemns suicide. The suicide desires bliss, and flees only 
from circumstance. He wills life. He hates only this 
life which he happens to have. No, this is not what the 
saints teach. One and all they counsel, as the path of 
perfection, the hard and steep road of Resignation. That 
alone leads to blessedness, to escape from the world. 
Deny the will to live. Forsake the power that builds the 
world. Deny the flesh. While you live be pitiful, mer¬ 
ciful, kindly, dispassionate, resisting no evil, turning away 
from all good fortune, thinking of all things as of vanity 
and illusion. The whole world, after all, is an evil dream. 
Deny the will that dreams, and the vision is ended. As 
for the result, “ we confess freely,” says Schopenhauer, 
in the famous concluding words of the fourth book of 
his first volume, “ what remains, after the entire annul¬ 
ling of the will, is, for all those who are yet full of the 
will, indeed nothing. But, on the other hand, for those 
in whom the will has turned again, and has denied itself, 
this our own so very real world, with all her suns and 
Milky Ways, is—Nothing.” 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


259 


Y. 

The estimate of the doctrine which we now have before 
us will be greatly aided if we bear in mind the nature 
of its historic genesis. The problem bequeathed by Kant 
to his successors was, as we have seen throughout both 
this and the preceding discussion, the problem of the re¬ 
lation of the empirical self of each moment to the total 
or universal self. This problem exists alike for Hegel 
and for Schopenhauer. Hegel undertakes to solve it by 
examining the process of self-consciousness. This pro¬ 
cess, developed according to his peculiar and paradoxical 
logic, which we have ventured to call the Logic of Pas¬ 
sion, shows him that in the last analysis there is and can 
be but one self, the absolute spirit, the triumphant solver 
of paradoxes. Sure of his process, Hegel despises every 
such mystical and immediate seizing of the Universal as 
had been characteristic of the romanticists. With just 
these romanticists, however, Schopenhauer has in common 
the immediate intuition whereby he seizes, not so much 
the universal self as, in his opinion, the universal and 
irrational essence or nature that is at the heart of each 
finite self, and of all things, namely, the Will. Yet when 
he describes this will, after his intuition has come to 
grasp it, he finds in it just the paradox that Hegel had 
logically developed. For Hegel, self-consciousness is, as 
even Fichte already had taught, essentially the longing to 
be more of a self than you are. Just so, for Schopen¬ 
hauer, if you exist you will, and if you will you are striv¬ 
ing to escape from your present nature. It is of the es¬ 
sence of will to be always desiring a change. If the Will 
makes a world, the Will as such will be sure, then, thinks 
Schopenhauer, to be endlessly dissatisfied with its world. 
For, once more, when you will, the very essence of such 
will is discontentment with what is yours now. I no 
longer make that an object of desire which I already 


260 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


possess. I will what I have not yet, but hope to get, as 
a poor man wills wealth, but a rich man more wealth. I 
will the future, the distant, the unpossessed, the victory 
that I have not yet won, the defeat of the enemy who still 
faces me in arms, the cessation of the tedium or of the 
pain that besets me. Do I attain my desire, my will 
ceases, or, which is the same thing, turns elsewhere for 
food. Curiously enough, this, which is precisely the 
thought that led Hegel to the conception of the absolutely 
active and triumphant spirit, appears to Schopenhauer 
the proof of the totally evil nature of things. Striving 
might be bearable were there a highest good, to which, by 
willing, I could attain, and if, when I once attained that 
good, I could rest. But if will makes the world and is 
the whole life and essence of it, then there is nothing in 
the world deeper than the longing, the unrest, which is the 
very heart of all willing. Does n’t this unrest seem tragic ? 
Is there to be no end of longing in the world? If not, 
how can mere striving, mere willing, come to seem beara¬ 
ble ? Here is the question which leads Schopenhauer to 
his pessimism. Precisely the same problem made Hegel, 
with all his appreciation of the tragedy of life, an optimist. 
Hegel’s Absolute, namely, is dissatisfied everywhere in his 
finite world, but is triumphantly content with the whole of 
it, just because his wealth is complete. 

An historical lecture like the present one has not to de¬ 
cide between the metaphysical claims and rights of the 
Schopenhauerian immediate intuition of the Universal 
and the Hegelian logic. As theories of the absolute, 
these two doctrines represent conflicting philosophical in¬ 
terests whose discussion would belong elsewhere. Our 
present concern is the more directly human one. Of the 
two attitudes towards the great spiritual interests of man 
which these systems embody, which is the deeper? To 
be sure, even this question cannot be answered without 
making a confession of philosophical faith, but that I 
must here do in merely dogmatic form. 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


261 


For my part, I deeply respect both doctrines. Both 
are essentially modern views of life, modern in their uni¬ 
versality of expression, in their keen diagnosis of human 
nature, in their merciless criticism of our consciousness, 
in their thorough familiarity with the waywardness of 
the inner life. The century of nerves and of spiritual 
sorrows has philosophized with characteristic ingenuity in 
the persons of these thinkers, — the one the inexorable 
and fairly Mephistoplielian critic of the paradoxes of 
passion, the other the nervous invalid of brilliant insight. 
We are here speaking only of this one side of their doc¬ 
trines, namely, their diagnosis of the heart and of the 
issues of life. How much of the truth there is in both, 
every knowing man ought to see. Capricious is the will 
of man, thinks Schopenhauer, and therefore endlessly 
paradoxical and irrational. Paradoxical is the very con¬ 
sciousness, and therefore the very reason, of man, finds 
Hegel; and therefore, where there is this paradox, there 
is not unreason, but the manifestation of a part of the 
true spiritual life, — a life which could not be spiritual 
were it not full of conflict. Hegel thus absorbs, as it 
were, the pessimism of Schopenhauer; while Schopen¬ 
hauer illustrates the paradox of Hegel. 

But if both doctrines stand as significant expressions 
of the modern spirit, a glance at our more recent litera¬ 
ture — at the despairing resignation of Tolstoi, with its 
flavor of mysticism, and at the triumphant joy in the para¬ 
doxes of passion which Browning kept to the end — 
will show us how far our romancers and poets still are 
from having made an end of the inquiry as to which doc¬ 
trine is the right one. My own notion about the matter, 
such as it is, would indeed need for its full development 
the context of just such a philosophical argument as I 
have declined to introduce at the present stage of this 
course. As constructive idealist, regarding the absolute 
as indeed a spirit, I am in sympathy with Hegel’s sense 


262 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


of the triumphant rationality that reigns above all the 
conflicts of the spiritual world. But as to Schopenhauer’s 
own account of life, I find indeed that his pessimism is 
usually wholly misunderstood and unappreciated, as well 
by those who pretend to accept as well by those who con¬ 
demn it. What people fail to comprehend concerning 
these deep and partial insights which are so characteristic 
of great philosophers is that the proper way to treat them 
is neither to scorn nor to bow down, but to experience, 
and then to get our freedom in presence of all such in¬ 
sights even by the very wealth of our experience. We 
are often so slavish in our relations with doctrines of this 
kind! Are they expressed in traditional, in essentially 
clerical language, as in the “ Imitation ” or in some other 
devotional book, then the form deceives us often into ac¬ 
cepting mystical resignation as if it were the whole of 
spirituality, instead of bearing, as it does bear, much the 
same relation to the better life that sculptured marble 
bears to breathing flesh. But if it is a Schopenhauer, a 
notorious heretic, who uses much the same speech, then 
we can find no refuge save in hating him and his gloom. 
In fact, pessimism, in its deeper sense, is merely an ideal 
and abstract expression of one very deep and sacred ele¬ 
ment of the total religious consciousness of humanity. 
In fact, finite life is tragic, very nearly as much so as 
Schopenhauer represented, and tragic for the very reason 
that Schopenhauer and all the counselors of resignation 
are never weary of expressing, in so far, namely, as it is at 
once deep and restless. This is its paradox, that it is 
always unfinished, that it never attains, that it throbs as 
the heart does, and ends one pulsation only to begin an¬ 
other. This is what Hegel saw. This is what all the 
great poets depict, from Homer’s wanderings of the much 
tossed and tried Odysseus down to “ In Memoriam ” of 
Tennyson, or the “ Dramatic Lyrics ” of Browning. Not 
only is this so, but it must be so. The only refuge from 


SCHOPENHAUER. 


263 


spiritual restlessness is spiritual sluggishness; and that, as 
everybody is aware, is as tedious a thing as it is insipid. 
For the individual the lesson of this tragedy is always 
hard; and he learns it first in a religious form in the 
mood of pure resignation. “I cannot be happy; I must 
resign happiness.” This is what all the Imitations and the 
Schopenhauers are forever and very justly teaching to the 
individual. Schopenhauer’s special reason for this view 
is, however, the deep and philosophical one that at the 
heart of the world there seems to be an element of ca¬ 
pricious conflict. That fact was what drove him to reject 
the World Spirit of the constructive idealists, and to speak 
only of a World-Will. But is this the whole story? No; 
if we ever get our spiritual freedom, we shall, I think, 
not neglecting this caprice which Schopenhauer found 
at the heart of things, still see that the world is divine 
and spiritual, not so much in spite of this capriciousness, 
as just because of it. Caprice is n’t all of reason ; but 
reason needs facts and passions to conquer and to ration¬ 
alize, in order to become triumphantly rational. The 
spirit exists by accepting and by triumphing over the 
tragedy of the world. Restlessness, longing, grief, — 
these are evils, fatal evils, and they are everywhere in the 
world; but the spirit must be strong enough to endure 
them. In this strength is the solution. And, after all, 
it is just endurance that is the essence of spirituality. 
Resignation, then, is indeed part of the truth, — resigna¬ 
tion, that is, of any hope of a final and private happiness. 
We resign in order to be ready to endure. But courage 
is the rest of the truth, — a hearty defiance of the whole 
hateful pang and agony of the will, a binding of the 
strong man by being stronger than he, a making of life 
once for all our divine game, where the passions are the 
mere chessmen that we move in carrying out our plan, 
and where the plan is a spiritual victory over Satan. Let 
us thank Schopenhauer, then, for at least this, that in his 


264 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


pessimism he gives us an universal expression for the 
whole negative side of life. If you will let me speak of 
private experience, I myself have often found it deeply 
comforting, in the most bitter moments, to have dis¬ 
counted, so to speak, all the petty tragedies of experience, 
all my own weakness and caprice and foolishness and 
ill fortune, by one such absolute formula for evil as Scho¬ 
penhauer’s doctrine gives me. It is the fate of life to 
be restless, capricious, and therefore tragic. Happiness 
comes, indeed, but by all sorts of accidents ; and it flies as 
it comes. One thing only that is greater than this fate 
endures in us if we are wise of heart; and this one thing 
endures forever in the heart of the great World-Spirit of 
whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection. This 
one thing, as I hold, is the eternal resolution that if the 
world will be tragic, it shall still, in Satan’s despite, be 
spiritual. And this resolution is, I think, the very essence 
of the Spirit’s own eternal joy. 


LECTURE IX. 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 

Idealism, in several of its most significant phases, has 
been described in the lectures on the movement from 
Kant to Hegel. In this lecture I have to discuss another 
phase of what I have several times called the return to 
the outer order. In looking back for a moment at certain 
of the suggestions of the last lecture, I shall not ask you 
to dwell any more upon Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Of 
that topic we have had doubtless enough for the present. 
Coming as we do to a more cheerful chapter of modern 
philosophy, we want only to remind ourselves, at the out¬ 
set, of another element in Schopenhauer’s thought, and 
one which will be of importance for the work that we now 
have in hand. 

Schopenhauer, as you may remember, while he was in 
his own way an idealist on a Kantian basis, was not, on 
the whole, what one would call, somewhat technically, a 
constructive idealist. That is, while he was very positive 
in saying that the world which we see and feel is just the 
world of our ideas, and nothing else, he did not follow out 
the plan of Fichte or of the romanticists by trying to show 
constructively what sort of a world we are all rationally 
bound to see. On the contrary, as Schopenhauer holds, 
the world that we see is at once the world of the self, of 
the inner life, and is also the world of that capricious 
will which is the very heart of the inner life. You can¬ 
not deduce a priori anything about the sorts of reality 
which this world must express and contain. You cannot 
say, with Fichte, that it must be the world of the moral 


266 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

law, das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht. You 
cannot say, with Schelling, that it must be the world 
which expresses in symbolic form the life of a rational 
and gigantic Wbrld-Spirit. You must take the world as 
you find it. You may be sure indeed of its unity, yet 
this assurance rests only upon your power to prove that 
all diversity is due to our sense-forms of time and space, 
and is therefore illusory. But the longing and struggling 
will cannot be described apart from experience. The 
philosopher must become a naturalist. He must look 
upon the world as the spectator looks on during a tragedy 
which he knows beforehand to be full of action and of 
suffering, but which he must watch before he can know 
the plot. 

It is this thought of Schopenhauer’s that brings him 
very near to the position of most students of modern sci¬ 
ence. Schopenhauer marks then, in the history of 
thought, the transition from the romantic idealism to the 
modern realism, the return to the natural order. He is 
indeed an idealist of a Kantian type. He is philosopher 
in his sense of the unity of things, in his assurance that 
all phenomenal plurality is a mere illusion, in his reitera¬ 
tion of the Hindoo That art Thou , and in his Kantian 
idealism itself. But as to the individual facts of the 
world, he is proud to be a naturalist, who studies men 
and beasts and art and flowers, merely to find out what 
the Will is doing. 

i. 

What I now want you to feel is that all this was in so 
far a natural and a healthy turn for the idealistic philo¬ 
sophy to take. Philosophy had begun, in modern times, 
with the external order and with dogmatic assertions 
about it. Growing doubtful and self-critical, it had next 
fallen to scrutinizing the inner life. Becoming bold and 
clear as to both its powers and its limitations it had later 
said, with Kant: “ Things in themselves, indeed, are n’t 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 267 

for me; but as for the order and unity of phenomenal 
nature, that is mine, and is even of my own creating.” 
Waxing, however, afresh, still bolder, thought had next 
asserted: “ Not only the order of nature, but the very 
content of nature is spiritual, and is even the creation of 
the very spirit whom my life embodies in finite form.” 
“ I therefore,” it continued, “ have a right to seize hold 
upon and to master the very deepest mysteries of this 
whole spiritual creation. There shall be no limits to my 
ventures, and no things in themselves shall stand between 
me and the rational construction of reality at which I 
aim.” But here, indeed, the idealist had been doomed to 
fresh disappointment. That the world is the world of the 
absolute spirit he could make indeed plausible, — how 
plausible we ourselves have hardly had time in our brief 
survey to see. That, deeper than your conscious nature 
or than mine, there is a truth at the heart of the inner 
life of which we as finite spirits are embodiments, all this 
the idealist could try to explain by showing how the com¬ 
munity of our sense-worlds, our own human power to act 
in practical and rational concert, and all the other presup¬ 
positions of our spiritual existence, lead us to postulate 
that the whole environment of our inner life is spiritual, 
that there is but one self, and that this self is God. But, 
after all, even granting the force of these considerations, 
one difficulty remained which the idealists could not con¬ 
quer. Whatever your formula for the postulated spiritual 
world, whether it were Fichte’s moral law or the various 
wayward theories of the romanticists, an element of stub¬ 
born caprice remained. From the constructions of your 
ideal philosophy to the empirical facts of outer nature 
remained a long and hopelessly tangled way. The world 
might be thus rational, but it was evident that the abso¬ 
lute spirit must be thinking of many things that you, in 
your finite weakness, could not well presume to construct 
a priori . 


268 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

In view of all this, thought, as we now see, must be 
content to take one more step, not, as many superficial 
students of modern thought have supposed, the step of 
repenting once for all of the whole undertaking of the 
idealistic period, but rather the step of returning, enriched 
by the experience and the depth of insight which this 
period had produced, to the cautious scrutiny and rational 
interpretation of the external order itself. The first 
charge of idealism upon the fortress of the spiritual mys¬ 
teries of the world was indeed in one sense a failure. 
Constructive idealism meant, as the romanticists showed, 
no small danger of arbitrary speculative guesses, of way¬ 
wardness, and of dreaming. If Hegel sought to put an 
end to all this capriciousness by his marvelously skillful 
construction of the essence of the absolute spirit in terms 
of a formula derived from the study of the inner life, still, 
as we saw, this formula also was quite inadequate to the 
expression of the facts of outer nature. Hegel made a 
skillful diagnosis of the logic of passion. He pointed out 
how spirituality means conflict. He tried to show how 
this conflict proceeds from lower to higher stages, and 
how, in its evolution, all the forms of spirituality which 
human civilization in its growth exemplifies are necessa¬ 
rily produced. In this way Hegel built up, after his own 
fashion, an inadequate but profoundly suggestive philoso¬ 
phy of history, as well as a sort of rational construction of 
the whole content of human, social, and political life. In 
other words, Hegel tried to show how, on a Kantian basis, 
the world of human passion can be explained, and how 
we can escape from what we called the prison of the inner 
life, and prove ourselves to be in the world of the infinite 
spirit. Every step of Hegel’s investigation was indeed 
open to some question, but in his own proper field he 
discovered what might be said to offer very high hopes to 
the rational idealist. But not even Hegel could really get 
into the charmed circle of the empirical sciences, and com 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 269 


struct the facts of nature upon the postulates of idealism. 
He attempted this after a certain limited fashion, as 
Schelling had attempted it; but he failed. Both his pre¬ 
tensions in this regard and the nature of his failure have 
indeed been distorted and misrepresented by unjust oppo¬ 
nents ; but in any case there remains the fact that, as I 
just said, the first onslaught of idealism upon the central 
mysteries of reality failed; and it became necessary to 
consider what next to do. 

How simple, then, under these circumstances, for ideal¬ 
ists, or for men who had been trained in the idealistic 
school, but who saw this incompleteness of constructive 
idealism, — how simple for them now to say : “ That the 
world is spiritual, that the inner life is in fact at the heart 
of it, seems, after Kant, clear. But equally clear it is 
that, at the depth of this nature which the inner life thus 
reveals to us, there are spiritual mysteries which for us, 
in our present ignorance, are so far unfathomable. Doubt¬ 
less these mysteries are n’t unfathomable in themselves; 
doubtless the one spirit whose life embodies itself in all 
our inner natures knows what he means, and has some 
sort of interpretation for even the apparently most capri¬ 
cious of his truths. But as for us, in our conscious na¬ 
ture, we only know that we, just now, are forced to see 
this sense-world and to work in it. Let us then turn for 
the solution of our mysteries back again to the long and 
painful road of experience. Why we are bound by our 
inner nature to see this world of sense-facts we can surely 
never say, until we shall have first learned empirically 
what sense-facts we are bound to see. This, however, 
only science can teach us.” 

We return to the natural order, as you see, in company 
with such thinkers, but by no means as if, in returning, 
we left our idealism behind us. We return, but, once 
more, not to that outer order which we left for the paths 
of speculation in the seventeenth century. The empirical 


270 


THE SPIRIT OP MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


sciences, which, in their own way and largely apart from 
any but indirect speculative influences, have been develop¬ 
ing ever since the seventeenth century, which have been 
extending their field, elaborating their theories, tilling 
their vast and fruitful fields, will indeed no doubt at first 
misinterpret our return. Their servants, full of the learn¬ 
ing and the successes of two centuries of inductive re¬ 
search, will scornfully say: “ See these idealists ! They 
long tried to call the world their dream, and to construct 
it a 'priori. But they grew hungry in their wilderness, 
feeding the swine of strange masters, and longing for the 
very husks of speculative guess-work and delusion. Now 
they come back like prodigals, hoping that experience, our 
master, will have facts enough and to spare for them. In 
truth, had they remained at home, their reflective clever¬ 
ness might have been of much use to science. But they 
took the portion of intelligence that belonged to them, 
and went away; and here they come now, in all the rags 
of their poor systems.” So, perhaps, the scoffers will 
insist. But this sort of scorn will not impose upon us. 
We know that we were not prodigals, but rather spies, 
sent to spy out the land of promise, and what we bring 
back with us are great clusters of grapes as specimens of 
the wealth of a land of milk and honey beyond the Jordan 
of mystery. That land is still unconquered. We return 
to the friendly camp in the wilderness of this world, and 
we ask its followers to arise and go with us, that we may 
yet enter into that land, and possess it. 

But, figures aside, our undertaking as we return to the 
study of the natural order is simply this: the mystery of 
the world is for us through and through an ideal, a spir¬ 
itual mystery. This great order is once for all divine. 
And thus much our idealism has taught us, namely, (1) 
by showing us that, except for the world of ideas, except 
for the phenomena that appear as outer to beings with 
minds, or that have their place in the inner life of such 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 271 

beings, there is no reality at all; (2) by showing us, as 
Kant has shown, that there can be no rational order in 
nature unless the thought of some rational being intro¬ 
duces such order, and (3) by leading us to postulate, as 
all the post-Kantian constructive idealists have postulated, 
that beneath the nature of our conscious self, which finds 
itself forced to recognize this or that as outer, there must 
lie a complete, an infinite Self, which somehow, whether 
by a divine caprice or by a divine rationality, or by both 
combined, is actually and of its own nature not outwardly 
forced, but inwardly minded, to express itself in this 
whole vast world of ours. If, with all this at heart, we 
return to the outer order, it is because we desire our ideal¬ 
ism to remain no longer barren, abstract, afraid of ex¬ 
perience, capricious, wayward, sentimental, or fantastic. 
We want our idealism to do a manly work. We want it 
to enter upon its true task, not of dreaming of a possible 
perfection, but of transforming, of enlivening, of spirit¬ 
ualizing, the concrete life of humanity. Idealism on one 
side, dreaming its splendid dreams ; science on the other 
side, condemned to an irrational and Philistine enmity to 
the spiritual, — what spectacle could be more unworthy of 
humanitj'! In fact, nobody has ever really desired such 
a situation. In its most fantastic moments idealism, un¬ 
less it were perchance the romantic irony of some young 
Friedrich Schlegel, has been sincerely anxious to embody 
experience, and to get at the truth of life. Science, on 
the other hand, in the person and work of any earnest 
and sensible investigator, however narrow his specialty, 
however unspiritual seemed his facts, has been through 
and through spiritual in its inmost conception of reality. 
Divorced from speculation, as it has usually chosen to be, 
during the latter half of the eighteenth century and the 
first decades of the nineteenth century, it still has never 
lost sight of its task, namely, to elaborate the facts of 
experience in such wise as to find and to make apparent 


272 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

in them the laws, the essential truths, the ideas of things. 
When in Laplace’s “ Celestial Mechanics,” and in La¬ 
grange’s completion of the system of the whole mechani¬ 
cal science of his day, a vast multitude of the most con¬ 
fusing natural phenomena were reduced to expressions of 
a very few ultimate and rigid thoughts, what was this but 
an embodiment of the search for rationality in nature ? 
And all modern science up to the moment of which we 
are now speaking has been one vast and toilsome poem of 
rationality, fragmentary indeed, but even in its fragments 
how beautiful! 

The business of speculation is then already outlined. 
What science seeks is essentially what we are seeking, — 
to catch the rhythm and the very pulse-beat of the reason 
that is and must be, amidst all the caprice of nature, yes, 
even because of this wealth of caprice in nature, at the 
very heart of the world. We return to the world of sci¬ 
ence, then, to enrich its postulates by our idealistic inter¬ 
pretation, and to enrich our own too abstract fashion of 
conceiving the rationality of things through the wealth of 
nature’s facts. 

Thus, as you see, I am now trying, still, of course, in 
my attitude as mere chronicler, to express the spirit in 
which, in the early decades of this century, many men of 
considerable speculative training set about their work in 
various departments of empirical research. They were 
idealists at heart; they became scientific specialists by 
profession. Of course, such is the narrowness of human 
nature, that only with great difficulty could such persons 
keep at once the purity of their idealistic faith and the 
exactness of their powers of empirical observation, equally 
well in sight as they toiled. Some of them, especially in 
Germany, remained for a long time the prey of various 
forms of systematic delusion, and warped their observa¬ 
tions in order to illustrate their voluminous speculations. 
Still more of them, however, in turning their attention to 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 273 


exact scholarship, or to physical science, sought as much 
as possible to lay aside whatever speculative concern they 
had ever possessed. But still, after all, say what one will, 
one cannot fairly examine the thinking of this our cen¬ 
tury without seeing that during its whole course empiri¬ 
cal research and the truly philosophical spirit have been 
bound in a close marriage tie compared to which all previ¬ 
ous unions of speculation and of experience have been but 
the most passing moods of mutual admiration. 

The most noteworthy offspring and illustration of this 
marriage tie has been the vast industry that has gathered 
about what we now call the idea of evolution, as a law, or 
rather, a group of laws, of nature. 


ii. 

The philosophy of evolution was, in fact, to be my spe¬ 
cial topic to-day, and doubtless I have spent too long a 
time in approaching this topic itself. But so much I 
have gained if I have now prepared the way for a brief 
preliminary statement of the nature of the process whereby 
this philosophy arose in modern thinking. The way was 
this: Idealism having proved as unable to construct the 
visible world upon any a priori rational scheme, as it was 
successful in laying the foundation for the spiritual phi¬ 
losophy of the future, the problem that the earlier ideal¬ 
ists had left to their successors was now: To comprehend 
the world of experience in terms of the fundamental 
idealistic postulates. In a search for the solution of this 
problem, thought was led to the rational study of human 
history. Surely if the great Spirit is anywhere to be 
manifest to us, then it should be in the growth of human¬ 
ity. To see this growth as a spiritual process became, 
therefore, an object of serious concern. Of course here, 
as everywhere else in science, some of the first efforts were 
bold and crude enough, but they were suggestive. They 
led in time to that vast undertaking known as modern 


274 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


historical research, a sort of study that, strange as it may 
seem to say so, is not yet a century old. For, as we shall 
see, what used to be called historical research was some¬ 
thing that in former centuries embodied a spirit very dif¬ 
ferent from what we now know as the historical spirit. 
But the interest thus aroused spread to other branches of 
science. Natural history, which formerly had been, not¬ 
withstanding its name, a merely descriptive science, began 
to be pursued upon a deeper plan; it became truly his¬ 
torical, examined into the genesis of organic forms, and, 
in the field of geological study, set about the study of 
the succession of organic forms upon the earth’s surface. 
The field thus entered upon proved unexpectedly fruitful. 
The century became the typical century of the histori¬ 
cal theory of creation. In previous periods of modern 
thought, thinkers had deliberately neglected the history 
of things. Nature, not as it grows, but as it eternally is, 
was that which constituted the outer order known to the 
seventeenth century. Events had little concern to a doc¬ 
trine like Spinoza’s. Newton’s conception of physical 
science was founded, indeed, upon the observation of the 
actual events of nature; but these events were to be ex¬ 
plained, if possible, by eternal laws like gravitation, and 
history was to be absorbed in mechanism. When the 
eighteenth century turned its eyes towards the inner life, 
it still studied an ideally permanent thing called human 
nature, which savage life illustrated in its primitive inno¬ 
cence, civilized life in its artificial disguises, but which 
nothing in heaven or earth, except the will of its creator, 
could essentially change. But for our nineteenth century 
it is just the change, the flow, the growth of things, that 
is the most interesting feature of the universe. Old- 
fashioned science used to go about classifying things. 
There were live things and dead things; of live things 
there were classes, orders, families, genera, species, — all 
permanent facts of nature. As for man, he had one char- 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 275 


acteristic type of inner life, tliat was in all ages and sta¬ 
tions essentially the same, — in the king and in the peas¬ 
ant, in the master and in the slave, in the man of the 
city and in the savage. The glory of science lay just in 
its power to perceive this essence of the eternally human 
everywhere in man’s life. The dignity of human nature, 
too, lay in just this its permanence. Because of such per¬ 
manence one could prove all men to be naturally equal, 
and our own Declaration of Independence is thus founded 
upon speculative principles that, as they are there stated, 
have been rendered meaningless by the modern doctrine 
of evolution. Valuable, indeed, was all this unhistorical 
analysis of the world and of man, valuable as a prepara¬ 
tion for the coming insight; but how unvital, how unspir¬ 
itual, how crude seems to us now all that eighteenth-cen¬ 
tury conception of the mathematically permanent, the 
essentially unprogressive and stagnant human nature, in 
the empty dignity of its inborn rights, when compared 
with our modern conception of the growing, struggling, 
historically continuous humanity, whose rights are nothing 
until it wins them in the tragic process of civilization, 
whose dignity is the dignity attained as the prize of un¬ 
told ages of suffering, whose institutions embody thou¬ 
sands of years of ardor and of hard thinking, whose treas¬ 
ures even of emotion are the bequest of a sacred antiquity 
of self-conquest! Not inalienable, but hard won and pain¬ 
fully kept are the true rights of man. Not a special crea¬ 
tion, but a living organism is our nature; an organism 
not permanent in its structure, but the outcome of labor; 
an organism with a long embryonic development, capable 
of degeneration as well as of growth, and needing there¬ 
fore our constant care lest it lose all the spirituality and 
all the rights that it has thus far acquired. 

Thus, I say, the historical conception of the world, and 
above all, of the world of human nature, has appeared in 
our modern life. I am now to trace more precisely the 


276 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


growth and the consequences of this doctrine of evolution. 
As in the case of the study of Schopenhauer, at the last 
time, my task is at once aided and hindered by the popu¬ 
lar reputation of my topic. Many of the things that one 
can most easily say about evolution are nowadays almost 
too familiar, having been discussed even in the newspa¬ 
pers until we are weary of them. On the other hand, a 
deeper insight into the true problems suggested by evolu¬ 
tion is rather the more difficult on account of this famil¬ 
iarity; for the aspect of a deep subject which we most 
need to reflect upon is never the one which purely popu¬ 
lar discussion is likely to favor. My difficulty is, there¬ 
fore, in part like the difficulty of one writing an essay 
upon Hamlet’s Soliloquy, or on the Beatitudes. The 
words are so familiar that the meaning comes to seem 
remote. Even so here ; the word 44 evolution ” occurs on 
very many modern title-pages, until one too easily forms 
a habit of shutting any new book in which he chances to 
encounter a term thus often repeated, but seldom appre¬ 
ciated. 

The modern historical spirit assumed a definite form 
not far from the time of the battle of Waterloo. The 
two events were, in fact, not at all disconnected. In Ger¬ 
many, the romantic school proper had by this time fallen 
into a decline. The romantic movement, in a wider sense, 
was, however, still flourishing, and, in fact the new histor¬ 
ical movement was a direct outgrowth of this romantic 
interest in life. As for the mechanism of the process, 
that is very obvious, but as it is not so frequently de¬ 
scribed to our public as it has been to the German public, 
I must dwell for a moment on the main aspects of the in¬ 
tellectual situation in Germany in the first decade of the 
century. Germany itself, as you know, was at this time 
a land trodden under the invader’s foot, corrupted by the 
invader’s appeals to the avarice of its minor princes, and 
left, in general, in a hopeless political situation, which, 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 277 

strangely enough, aroused no strong lamentations in the 
minds of the nation’s own best men. Hegel, for example, 
warmly admired for a time Napoleon, whom he saw in 
person about the time of the battle of Jena, and whom he 
then looked upon wonderingly as upon a sort of Welt- 
geist zu Pferde , as the philosopher in effect expressed 
himself. This political indifference, this free intellectual 
curiosity, which marveled at the changes of the age and 
felt no patriotic longings, was typical of the mood of all 
Germany’s intellectual class from Goethe down. Thought 
was, after all, free; one had the empire of the air and the 
recesses of the heart to one’s self, and one let contempo¬ 
rary history go its course as it would. Meanwhile, how¬ 
ever, this idealism without concrete and visible ideals was, 
as we have seen, not only a capricious but a dangerous 
thing. The representative younger poets of the time 
reveled, as we know, in emotion and in mystery. The 
whole romantic movement might be defined as a con¬ 
sciously wayward and, before it was done, a fairly morbid 
reflection upon the heart of man viewed merely as the 
heart. You felt, you experienced, you sang, you grew 
constantly more sentimental, you gloried in the wealth of 
your feelings, you wept in public with your numberless 
lyrics, and then you felt and experienced and sang again 
with endless ardor and garrulity. If you studied nature, 
you loved above all things mere mysteries, divining rods, 
magic, the night-side of nature generally. But, of course, 
in all this there had to be, after all, something objective 
as a foundation. Even feelings and mysteries must look 
for facts to support them, and, greatly to our advantage, 
the romanticists early turned their attention to certain 
records of humanity’s past experience which had been, 
until very recently, almost wholly neglected by modern 
students. Such records were of various classes, but had 
in common this, that they all alike stood for ancient, or 
else for very remote experiences, the product either of 


278 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

quite mysterious or of little understood times and peo¬ 
ples. The favorite sources of such records were the 
Orient and the Middle Ages. One could not have named 
two regions of learned research that were more remote 
from the customary thought of the middle of the eigh¬ 
teenth century than mediaeval and Oriental civilization ; 
one could not name any two branches of study that 
appealed more to the distinctively romantic spirit than 
did these. The Middle Ages, at any rate as men then 
conceived them, were of course the typical period of ro¬ 
mance. Then emotion had possessed every possible object 
wherein to revel, — mysteries, magic, unknown countries, 
crusades, knightly ideals, fairy tales, religious ardor, free¬ 
dom of artistic forms, adventures, castles, saints, and the 
Holy Roman Empire. Now that all these things had per¬ 
ished, what better could romantic poets and readers do 
than recall the long-past glories, and revive the buried 
emotions. As for the Orient, what wisdom might lie 
treasured there was still only faintly to be conjectured. 
The prosaic Englishmen indeed, having conquered India, 
had fallen to making learned researches into the litera¬ 
ture, the thought, and the laws of their new subjects, 
mainly with a view to the practical business of govern¬ 
ment. These researches had begun to become known on 
the Continent. Sacred books, some of them philosophical, 
had been translated. Meanwhile Mohammedan civiliza¬ 
tion also, from Persian and Arabic sources, was finding 
its way to the renewed attention of European scholars. 
No amateur esoteric Buddhist of our own day has felt a 
deeper curiosity about what this Oriental wisdom might 
mean, or has labored harder to find out, than did numerous 
scholarly youth of this romantic period. Poets imitated 
Oriental forms ; Hindu pantheism, or Persian Sufism, was 
clothed in melodious verse by such voluminous singers as 
Riickert; men like the Schlegels forgot the romantic 
irony, to learn Sanskrit; a Wilhelm von Humboldt ex- 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 279 

pounded the Bhagavat-gita. Thus began the scholarship 
that has produced the science of modern comparative phi¬ 
lology, and our whole knowledge of the true life of the 
far East. 

Now the thing to note, for our purpose, in all this new 
study, is, that its motive was at first mainly romantic, but 
that its outcome was very significantly scientific. The 
scholars of the two previous centuries had been linguists, 
with a great love, in many cases, of the aesthetic aspects 
of scholarship, but with little sense for what we now 
think to be the truly human element in the study of the 
languages and literatures of the world. It was the ro¬ 
mantic love of passion, of mystery, and emotion, that now 
set the heart’s blood of scholarship fairly bounding in the 
veins of the new learning. Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, the 
tongues of Europe in the Middle Ages, the old chroni¬ 
clers, the poems of the mediaeval Empire, — why, all 
such things, if the eighteenth-century scholar had even 
deigned to think of them with respect at all, would have 
seemed to him but a series of crabbed linguistic puzzles, 
not worthy for an instant of comparison with the problems 
of classical philology. But the romantic movement 
changed all that. The very spirit that in Great Britain 
expressed itself in Scott’s romances, once wedded to the 
minuteness of German scholarship, was destined to trans¬ 
form the whole study of history. 

For see, it was history that the romanticists thus found 
themselves erelong devotedly studying. Men who had 
set out to be merely fantastic dreamers perceived that the 
far-off humanity of Asia or of mediaeval Europe, had 
dreamed better than they themselves could ever hope to 
dream. As they studied the records of this humanity, 
the dead past became once more alive. It was the pres¬ 
ent that now seemed, in its swift changes and in its un¬ 
steady ideals, the unessential expression of the spirit of 
humanity. Above all, men felt how those far-off times had 


280 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


possessed, in their more permanent institutions, a trea¬ 
sure which the nineteenth century was daily risking, 
if not losing, in the shifting conflicts of the Napoleonic 
period. And thus the institutions of humanity, whose 
study has become so characteristic of our whole modern 
movement, first came into the foreground of attention. 
Laws, customs, religions, began to show a human worth 
which students had, up to that time, persistently ignored. 

In the keen interest that now quickly grew and con¬ 
creted itself, nothing was too insignificant to deserve ob¬ 
servation, if it illustrated the passions or the deeper faiths 
of men. Fairy tales, preserved in the mouths of the coun¬ 
try people, ballads, rural superstitions, seemed interesting 
to the wisest thinkers. Even the rude dialects of the 
illiterate began to acquire dignity. The human was not 
of necessity the cultivated. The human was the wide¬ 
spread or the ancient in speech or in behavior. It was 
the deep, the emotional, the thing much loved by many 
men, the poetical, the organic, the vital, in civilization. 
Scholars looked for it not in modern books, but in the 
lore of forgotten ages, or heard it from the mouths of the 
very peasantry of their own time. The brothers Grimm 
began to collect their German popular tales. Poets were 
proud to imitate the ballads of the people. 

Nor did classical philology itself remain uninfluenced 
by the romantic movement. On the contrary, this move¬ 
ment transformed its very ideals and methods. It was 
no longer to favor mere linguistic skill, nor to cultivate 
taste by analyzing the finest models of ancient literary 
art. It was rather to comprehend the inner life of an¬ 
tiquity, to set forth the nature of Greek and Roman 
institutions, beliefs, and conduct, to show what relation 
that civilization had to our own, to make linguistic study 
a handmaid of truly humane scholarship, to treat the 
classical history, not as a mere collection of examples for 
moral or for literary edification, but as an evolution. For, 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 281 

already, as you see, the idea of what we call evolution was 
dawning on the minds of the scholars of that day. Far 
off indeed was our modern theory, with all its world-em¬ 
bracing inductions; but the spirit which it was to em¬ 
body was born of the very dreams of the romantic period. 
Herein lies the continuity of thought which connects us, 
in all the so-called realism of our prosaic modern research, 
with the dreamers who dreamed, with the fantastic poets 
who failed, in the first decades of our century. 

hi. 

But I have already somewhat anticipated. I said a 
moment since that the battle of Waterloo was not discon¬ 
nected with the first bloom of the new historical study. 
The connection is not far to seek. Before 1815 the help¬ 
lessness of Germany, bleeding and corrupted, left for the 
intellectual leaders of the people no resource equal to 
their dreams and their abstract idealism. The end of the 
Napoleonic episode brought room on earth for the feet of 
those who had long been traversing the empire of the 
air. The romanticists, however, did not on that account 
forsake contemplation. They only found themselves more 
disposed to scholarship, and less given to fantasy. I called 
the return to the natural order, a little while since, a re¬ 
turn to the wilderness of this present world. Of course, 
I might reverse the Scripture metaphor and, appealing 
now to the book of Revelation, say that, as Satan lay 
bound in St. Helena, the church of the spirit could return 
from the wilderness into which it had fled; and that it 
swiftly did so. The scholarly motives that we have just 
been analyzing produced hereupon, in quick succession, 
a long series of epoch-marking historical books. More¬ 
over, there was yet another reason why the political 
changes of the time were favorable to historical study. 
When great events are past, and a passionate episode of 
our lives is completed, we are easily disposed to the writ- 


282 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


ing of chronicles. After one’s first love affair, one keeps 
a diary for a season, or perhaps begins an autobiography, 
with special reference to the story of one’s mightier pas¬ 
sions. The doctrine of evolution took its rise in such an 
effort of humanity to write its own autobiography, after 
a terrible experience of being in love with what it had 
believed to be liberty, and of being jilted by what proved 
to be despotism. Thus all things worked together to the 
same end. It is surprising to look over the list of these 
great books, each one of which marks an era in modern 
investigation, and so many of which belong to the years 
between 1815 and 1835. The list shows a constant wid¬ 
ening and deepening of the historical interest. General 
literature, Roman law, mediaeval traditions and institu¬ 
tions, classical philology, Oriental literature, compara¬ 
tive philology, and at last Christian theology itself, are 
assailed after the historical fashion, and one research 
leads to another. The two Humboldts, the Schlegels, the 
Grimms, Niebuhr, Boeckh, Ranke, were all in the front 
rank of the students of the day, and a list, if complete, 
would name works by all of them, and by numerous other 
scarcely less important scholars. Curious was the fate 
that drove every scholarly specialty to become more and 
more historical. A book like Strauss’s 44 Life of Jesus ” 
might be in itself so novel in its methods, so tentative and 
imperfect in its hypotheses, that its own author would en¬ 
tirely change erelong his opinion about some of his own 
most noteworthy contentions. Yet the storm of contro¬ 
versy that it aroused would drive friend and foe to his¬ 
torical researches of a new sort; and the whole of mod¬ 
ern Christology, orthodox as well as unorthodox, has been 
profoundly modified by the indirect effect of Strauss’s 
bold and suggestive investigation. 

As for the outcome of all this ferment, it was inevita¬ 
bly the conception of the higher human life as one vast 
and connected growth from lower to nobler conditions, 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 283 

with episodes, indeed, of stagnation and degeneracy, and 
with vast outlying regions of almost changeless barbaric 
or imperfectly civilized mankind, but with a meaning, 
after all, about even the saddest of its phenomena, such 
as the moralizing historians of former generations had 
never understood. This meaning lay in the physical de¬ 
pendence of man, for his whole civilization and culture, 
upon the former generations of men. After a fashion 
people had, of course, always recognized such dependence. 
But how deep and how concrete the new history found 
the dependence to be! Our language, our institutions, 
our beliefs, our ideals, whatever in short, is mightiest and 
dearest in all our world, all this together is a slow and 
hard-won growth, nobody’s arbitrary invention, no gift 
from above, no outcome of a social compact, no immedi¬ 
ate expression of reason, but the slowly formed concre¬ 
tion of ages of blind effort, unconscious, but wise in its 
unconsciousness, often selfish, but humane even in its self¬ 
ishness. The ideals w r in the battle of life by the secret 
connivance, as it were, of numberless seemingly un-ideal 
forces. Climate, hunger, commerce, authority, supersti¬ 
tion, war, cruelty, toil, greed, compromise, tradition, con¬ 
servatism, loyalty, sloth, — all these cooperate, through 
countless ages, with a hundred other discernible tenden¬ 
cies, to build up civilization. And civilization itself is, 
in consequence, a much deeper thing than appears on the 
surface of our consciousness. Instinct has a larger share 
in it than reasoning. Faith counts for more in it than 
insight. It embodies in concrete form that deeper self 
that the idealists loved to talk about. Your deeper self is 
plainly a sort of abstract and epitome of the whole his¬ 
tory of humanity. A new and wiser form of the doc¬ 
trine of metempsychosis occurs to you. The humanity 
that toiled and bled and worshiped of old has trans¬ 
mitted to you, in your language and institutions, in the 
ancient lore that your fathers teach you, in your preju* 


284 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


dices, in your faults, in your conscience, in your religion, 
the very soul of its agony and of its glor}'. You can 
read in history your personal instincts written in the lan¬ 
guage of evolution. You can watch the human spirit in 
its growth with a deeper sense of the “ That art Thou ” 
than you had ever before possessed. The metaphors of 
your heathen ancestors are crystallized in every word that 
you utter. The very horrors of their superstitions are 
the true though humble origin of your loftiest and most 
sacred devotions. Humanity never really forsakes its 
past. The days of mankind are bound each to each in 
mutual piety. 

All these ideas have now, to be sure, become, by dint 
of much repetition, too commonplace. It is well for us to 
remember that the most cultivated thinkers of the last cen¬ 
tury scarcely in any measure possessed them. The unity 
of humanity, as the last century conceived it, was, I repeat, 
an abstract unity, a dead and permanent thing. All men 
had erect stature, language, reason, and the power to 
laugh. As some men stood straighter than others, so some 
men had more wit, and of such were the enlightened souls 
of that century. That was to their own minds the whole 
story of the unity of human life, and as for the growth of 
institutions, and all the agony of the winning of our life 
by the men of old, — the eighteenth century, at least until 
its very last decades, thanked God that it knew too much 
of wisdom to worry itself about any of the men of old ex¬ 
cept the wise ones, such as Cicero, or the elegant ones, 
such as Horace. Superstition you outgrew, the customs 
of your ancestors you prudently forgot, and of history you 
remembered only what it would be pleasing to narrate on 
a social occasion. Hence, as we see, our modern common¬ 
place is after all something of a novelty, even a paradox. 

I have dwelt so long upon this transformation of our 
notion of human history, because people too frequently 
regard the doctrine of evolution as having for the first 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 285 

time flashed upon the world after the appearance of Dar¬ 
win’s “ Origin of Species.’’ Nobody can value more than I 
do the significance for the general student of the splendid 
achievement of Darwin; but it was a splendid achieve¬ 
ment for humanity at large because the age was ripe for 
the extension of the historical conception far beyond the 
boundaries of humanity proper. And, once more, the 
age was thus ripe because by this time scholarship had 
brought into existence this very conception of history 
itself in the modern sense of the word. If you can con¬ 
ceive Darwin’s knowledge of natural history, his investi¬ 
gations, and his marvelous induction that led to the 
principle of natural selection, with all its consequences, 
if, I say, you can conceive all this transferred to the last 
century, some properly informed naturalists might, no 
doubt, have been convinced; but the world at large could 
have found no place for the doctrine. It would have been 
to them only one oddity the more in nature, or rather in 
speculation. They would have called it Darwin’s paradox, 
and would have banished it into the realm of curiosities. 
It was coming into an historical age that made Darwin’s 
book so great a prize, and the idea of natural selection so 
deeply suggestive to philosophy. 

And now, having spent so much time in laying our 
foundation, we can swiftly suggest in a few words the 
climax of the doctrine of evolution which the natural 
sciences have at last made possible. Germany began the 
historical movement. It was left for England to com¬ 
plete the ascendency of the new thought. It is matter of 
popular knowledge that geology, in its modern form, is 
largely due to the British mind. Lyell’s researches sub¬ 
stituted for the catastrophes which the earlier geologists 
conceived relatively uniform natural processes, whereby, 
as they worked through long ages, the earth’s crust had 
been slowly modified. On the basis of this uniformi- 
tarian geology, a doctrine of the transformation of species 


286 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


began to look more reasonable. Such a doctrine, indeed, as 
a mere speculation, is one of the oldest guesses of infant 
science, and even the Darwinian notion of natural selection 
had been first formulated in Greek speculation by Em¬ 
pedocles, before the time of Socrates. But such guesses, 
however finely a Schelling might write out their substance 
in poetical form, as we found him doing awhile since, 
could never mean much for science until modern geology 
had made probable that the earth’s crust itself has a gen¬ 
uine history, wherein there is more of unity than of catas¬ 
trophic change. But herewith came very quickly the time 
when natural history as a whole could assume the truly 
historical shape. Yon Baer’s embryologieal researches, 
and the classifications and embryologieal studies of Agas¬ 
siz, showed that wonderful parallelism between the growth 
of the individual life and the relation of each animal form 
to its neighbors and predecessors on the earth, which soon 
came to have so deep a scientific meaning. The appear¬ 
ance of Darwin’s “ Origin of Species ” in 1859, however, 
brought to a focus all these tendencies of modern re¬ 
search. With the one exception of Newton’s “ Principia,” 
no single book of empirical science has even been of more 
importance to philosophy than this work of Darwin’s. 
And you know now wherein the importance lay. The 
world was longing for an historical view of phenomena. 
The historical interest was already excited to the keenest 
pitch. Human civilization was already conceived as an 
evolution. The earth’s crust was already known to em¬ 
body a history whose gaps, still, even at this present 
moment, very large, were already, in 1859, sufficiently 
reduced to make probable the notion that a continuous 
series of physical process, without violent convulsions, 
had produced the whole succession of geological strata. 
The old nebular hypothesis of Kant and La Place sug¬ 
gested that the whole growth of our solar system to its 
present form had been part of the very process that has 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 287 


ended in our own geological history. Only the boundary 
line between species and species, only the difficulty of con¬ 
ceiving in scientific terms the growth of animal forms 
without the interference anywhere of special creations, 
only this, which was, of course, most felt in case of the 
distinction between man and the animals, remained as an 
apparently impassable obstacle in the way of the triumph 
of the historical movement. Darwin’s book removed this 
last great obstacle. In the working of natural selection 
he found an agency sufficient to explain, in part, if not in 
the main, the transformation of species. And there could 
be no question, after his researches, that natural selection 
is a vera causa , that is, is actually at work in the organic 
world. Moreover, he showed, in his first and in his later 
works, that the whole mass of evidence for the transfor¬ 
mation of species and the animal origin of man is far 
greater than the evidence that natural selection itself is 
the only natural agency at work. In fact, since Darwin, 
while naturalists differ endlessly as to the degree to which 
natural selection is responsible for the transformation of 
species, further investigation has put it farther and farther 
beyond question that, once granting the postulates of em¬ 
pirical science, the doctrine of the transformation of spe¬ 
cies, and of the animal origin of man, is simply beyond 
question. All modern naturalists of note are in this sense 
followers of Darwin, not that they all hold his views about 
natural selection, but that they all teach the doctrine of 
transformation. 

But our interest is just now much less in this bit of 
empirical science as such than in the philosophical views 
to which it has led men. 


IV. 

The doctrine of evolution had its rise, as we have now 
seen, in a twofold interest. This interest was first an 
historical one, the offspring of the idealistic interest in the 


288 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY". 


meaning of things, the product of an age for which the 
processes of the world were primarily spiritual processes, 
or were to be interpreted in the light and by the analogy 
of such processes. But, on the other side, this interest was 
a strongly empirical one, the offspring of a dread of the 
extravagances of the idealistic period, the product of a 
hard-learned lesson in caution, the embodiment of an un¬ 
willingness to mistake fantasy for truth. On the one side, 
then, the doctrine of evolution is to be sharply distin¬ 
guished from the naturalism of the seventeenth century. 
Unlike that naturalism our modern doctrine is primarily 
disposed, not merely to explain, but to estimate nature. 
It tries to find growth in the world as well as mechanism, 
progress as well as law, ideally interesting products as 
well as absolutely rigid processes. But, on the other 
hand, the same doctrine has become more and more dis¬ 
posed, as time has gone on, to suppress, or at all events to 
subordinate its own original idealism ; for it is a doctrine 
about experience, a theory founded on observation; and 
mere experience as such does n’t show us ideal forces at 
work in nature, only facts that we, as observers, are able 
to interpret, if we like, in terms of ideals. Without in¬ 
terest in the historical aspect of things, without, then, an 
essentially idealistic concern for what the events of the 
world mean , for what story they seem to embody, we 
should never have come upon this notion of evolution at 
all. But without a patient devotion to facts, and a rigid 
self-control as to our romantic interpretations, we should 
never have done the work necessary to verify the notion. 
There remains, then, something conflicting, something in¬ 
herently self-contradictory in the views nowadays current 
as to the nature of the process of evolution itself. This 
inner conflict of modern thought furnishes one of the 
most characteristic problems of to-day. It is the problem 
of the so-called Philosophy of Evolution. The empirical 
generalization that the whole life of our planet is in all 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 289 

probability one continuous process, free from unintelli¬ 
gible or magical breaks and interferences, is one great 
outcome of modern research, — an outcome inconceivable 
except on the basis of numerous presuppositions which 
philosophy must analyze, but for all that an outcome that 
appeals for proof to the facts of experience, rather than 
to the romantic intuitions of the age of Schelling. But 
the interpretation of this generalization, — the inner sense 
of it, — what of that ? Have we hereby banished ideals 
from the world ? have we really restored the faith in the 
rigid outer order of Spinoza? or have we not rather, for 
the first time, got a true empirical verification of the pre¬ 
sence of the great active Spirit in his world ? Is it the 
continuity, the physical necessity, the unalterably fatal 
law of the process that our science is beginning to make 
clear ? or is it rather the immanence in nature of ideal 
powers, of significant tendencies, that from the beginning 
so moulded the atoms, so predetermined the laws of their 
mechanism, so endowed them with swift flight and with 
close affinity, that the outcome of ages of their motion 
has been spiritual, — is it this that we are now discover¬ 
ing by our experience? Here the thought of our day 
pauses, hesitant; here the spirit in which the whole labor 
of the century was begun stands in conflict with the 
spirit of positive and empirical science that the century 
has developed as it has proceeded. 

But whatever is to be the outcome of this conflict, let 
me point out to you that at all events those who are now¬ 
adays accustomed to speak of a Philosophy of Evolution, 
ought to have no doubt as to what their expression, if it 
is to mean anything, must mean. A doctrine of evolu¬ 
tion may be, like Darwin’s doctrine of natural selection, 
a purely empirical theory, a generalization from facts 
with a use of the postulates of science, and nothing more. 
How nature came by this seemingly ideal character of 
her processes, such an empirical doctrine nfeed not try to 


290 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


explain. But a philosophy of evolution, if there is ever 
to be one, must face just that ultimate question, Has the 
world a meaning ? and, as a philosophy of a true evolu¬ 
tion , must answer that question in the affirmative ; for a 
philosophy, or at all events an affirmative, a positive phi¬ 
losophy, is, as we have seen all along, an effort to express, 
and by criticism to establish, the presuppositions of the 
age which it reflects upon. Now the presumption of an 
historical age is that there is a history embodied in the 
known world, and a philosophy of evolution must be an 
effort to give voice to this presupposition. If there is 
anything true in a philosophy of evolution, then there is 
something more than mere physical causation, mere mech¬ 
anism in the world; for how there can be history in the 
world, no causal explanation, no appeal to mechanism as 
such, can ever directly express. In so far as you find 
mechanism only in the world, you find neither growth nor 
decay; you find no story at all. The return to the outer 
order in our century has therefore in its presupposition 
not been a return to the old outer order of the seventeenth 
century. It has been a return to a world pervaded, as it 
were, with the spirit of idealism. If there is not merely 
a group of sciences having a fictitiously historical interest, 
but a true evolution, then there are ideal interests ex¬ 
pressed in this outer order of nature, spiritual passions 
(to borrow Schelling’s romantic expression) frozen into 
this lava stream of nature’s mechanism. Those who have 
believed that the spirit of the age of evolution removed 
ideals, removed teleology from the world, have, then, 
failed to see that the presupposition of our historical age, 
ever since Kousseau and the romantic period, has been 
that history is worth studying for its own sake, and that 
therefore ideals are responsible for nature’s mechanism. 

But just herein, you see, lies once more the deepest 
problem of recent philosophy. The seventeenth century, 
before doubt and idealism came, used to say : “We know 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 291 

that there are rigid and necessary laws of nature’s mecha¬ 
nism ; and as all is necessary, therefore the historical is 
insignificant. The world of to-day is the world of eter¬ 
nity.” But our age, returning to a seemingly rigid outer 
order, returns with idealism in its reflective thought, with 
spiritual passion as its deepest presupposition, and insists 
trhat, whatever nature’s mechanism, there is still no know¬ 
ledge so profound as the knowledge of the history of 
things. Yet how can this insistence be defended ? The 
doctrine of evolution, I assert, is in heart and essence the 
child of the romantic movement itself. Can the child, 
inheriting its mother’s depth and longing for wisdom, 
defend this inheritance in this vast outer universe of rigid 
order and absolute law ? That is the true problem of the 
philosophy of evolution. I know many who regret the ten¬ 
dency in our day to apply the doctrine of the transforma¬ 
tion of species to humanity, who fear the apparently 
materialistic results of the discovery that the human mind 
has grown. For my part there lies in all this discovery 
of our day the deeply important presupposition that the 
transition from animal to man is in fact really an evolu¬ 
tion, that is, a real history, a process having significance. 
If this is in truth the real interpretation of nature, then 
the romantic philosophy has not dreamed in vain, and the 
outer order of nature will embody once more the life of a 
divine Self. 

v. 

Yet we must not too much anticipate later results. 
Presuppositions are not yet the philosophy which is to 
establish them ; passions are not yet proofs. Let me try, 
as I close, to suggest something of those attitudes towards 
the problems of our day which are now best known and 
most characteristic. Thus I shall be able to conclude our 
historical sketch, and to pass to the second and more posi¬ 
tive part of our survey of modern problems. 

Towards the vast world of science with the endless mul- 


292 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


titude of its facts, collected as they have been under the 
influence of the spirit that I have been describing in the 
present lecture, it is possible to take the attitude of de¬ 
claring that, whatever interest led to their collection, the 
facts are now so numerous and complex as to exclude 
henceforth and forever any attempts at a philosophy. 
The fantastic failures of the idealistic age may be looked 
upon as illustrating the weakness of human powers. A 
modest sense of the puzzling mystery of things may re¬ 
gard as final in Kant’s doctrine only its confession of 
ignorance ; and may find in the later systems only ro¬ 
mances. The business of to-day, one may declare, is with 
science, with the world of experience, with the facts. 
The world in its wholeness is too much for us. The out¬ 
come of philosophy has been the one lesson of the need of 
recognizing our limitations. 

This result of the return to the outer order is nowadays 
natural and familiar enough. In so far as it expresses a 
mere private and personal unwillingness on the part of 
many people to undertake the philosophical task, I respect 
this spirit, and urge no argument against those who hap¬ 
pen to be possessed by it. Reflection is not a man’s 
whole business. Our modern world is indeed vast. There 
is a great diversity of gifts amongst us. Many of us are 
better men without philosophy. Let such as are so cling 
to experience. I will not molest them. These lectures 
are not addressed to them. 

I object to this way of looking at the modern situation 
of human thought only when those who assume it declare 
that the history of thought teaches this sort of resigna¬ 
tion, or that the problems and results of modern science 
demand it of us in any novel or peculiar sense. On the 
contrary, if ever there was an age that demanded not res¬ 
ignation, but industry in philosophy, it is our own. The 
incomplete results of the previous periods of thought, the 
wondrous suggestiveness of Kant, the marvelous analyses 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 293 


of self-consciousness, and of its relation to truth, whereof 
the idealistic age is full, this new problem suggested by 
the doctrine of evolution, — are not all these things a 
challenge to our time, a challenge such as previous ages 
have never heard ? What our age is challenged to do is, 
not to invent some revolutionary novelty in philosophy, 
but to organize the outcome of earlier reflection. Organ¬ 
ization — it is the one greatest idea of our time. Synthe¬ 
sis — it is the one undertaking of our century. Do you 
find a mass of fragmentary little states, spiritually related 
by tongue and literature, sundered by bitter fortune, — 
then by blood and iron you make them into one empire. 
Is your republic endangered by local jealousies and pri¬ 
vate interests, — then at the cost of years of warfare you 
force these factions to know their own brotherhood. Is 
society imperiled by too much individualism, — then your 
leaders become filled with the spirit of social organization. 
Everywhere the same spirit is abroad. Shall thought 
remain untouched by it? Shall reflection, frightened by 
the diversity of opinions, refuse to attempt their synthesis ? 
For what is needed, I repeat, is not some new gospel, 
preached by an angel from heaven, but a synthesis of the 
truth that we now have ready at hand. Schopenhauer 
and Hegel, Spinoza and Kant, mechanism and teleology, 
nature and evolution, experience and reason, — these are 
all, not mere names for warring tendencies, whose conflict 
proves that all things are and must remain a mystery to 
us men; these stand rather for embodiments now of 
this, now of that deeper truth. Their existence is, I re¬ 
peat, a challenge to us, not to see how much they differ, 
but how well they belong together. No other age ever 
had so rich a suggestion of such a synthesis of truth. 
Can we afford to neglect our opportunity ? 

It is n’t despair, then, that the complexity of modern 
thought teaches us. It is rather the wondrous beauty of 
the philosophical problem of the age that is shown us by 


294 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


this very complexity. Nor is the return to the outer order 
necessarily a forsaking of philosophic theory for experi¬ 
ence. No, experience itself is meaningless without pre¬ 
suppositions. Every one has an unconscious philosophy. 
Every one has beliefs about the world as world, and in its 
wholeness. One may neglect or even hate a conscious 
philosophy. Nobody is without the faith that it would 
need a whole philosophy to make articulate. The ques¬ 
tion, What is experience ? was Kant’s own question ; and 
to that question the whole idealistic age was a fragmen¬ 
tary answer. In vain, then, do you say: I, for my part, 
hold fast by experience, and forsake theory. There is in 
truth no experience without theory, and philosophy is 
simply theory brought to consciousness of itself. 


VI. 

But now, if, still following the history of current ten¬ 
dencies, one passes to a mention of those thinkers who, 
recognizing the true situation of modern thought, and not 
abhorring reflection, have undertaken this great synthetic 
task of philosophy itself, and have done so from the mod¬ 
ern point of view, you will at once think, especially in 
connection with the doctrine of evolution, of the name of 
Mr. Herbert Spencer. You will ask of me, at this point, 
some suggestion of the relation of this noteworthy thinker 
to the movement whose growth I have been following. 
The barest suggestion, indeed, is all that I can make. 
Mr. Spencer will be to me here an illustration of one way 
of meeting the modern situation as it has now been 
described. Mr. Spencer, as everybody who knows any¬ 
thing of his career is aware, did not wait for the appear¬ 
ance of Darwin’s “ Origin of Species ” before seizing 
upon the idea of his general “ Formula of Evolution.” 
The thought that the processes of nature are historical, 
that the very mechanism of the physical world is such as 
is bound to show to the onlooking spectator the spectacle 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 295 


of a rhythmic alternation of growth and decay, and that 
in this rhythmic alternation all the various histories of the 
solar system, of the earth’s crust, and of the life of the 
animals and of men, are contained, — this thought came 
early to the mind of this singularly patient and many- 
sided student of science and of politics. During the fifties 
he thought out the main outlines of his future system of 
synthetic philosophy, published the first edition of his 
“ Psychology,” and embodied in periodical essays his 
notion of “ Progress, its Law and Cause,” as well as the 
application of this notion to several important problems of 
natural history, of social science, and of the history of hu¬ 
manity. Early in the sixties his system began to appear; 
but it was not until after 1870 that he won the general 
recognition which has made him, in this country, in the 
eyes of so many, the one true prophet of the philosophy 
of evolution, and that has given him a worthy name and 
influence throughout the realm of European scientific in¬ 
quiry. To-day his system is still unfinished. A world 
of new investigations, which he follows industriously but 
without noteworthy change of his opinions, has grown up 
about him, inviting him to eternally new labors, but 
always only confirming in his mind his own convictions. 
He undertook long since the task of a Titan. He has 
pursued this task for full thirty years with the patience 
of an enthusiast. The skillful devotion of the man is 
unquestionable. His value as an awakener and organizer 
of research is vast. What can we say of his place in the 
history of philosophy ? 

Mr. Spencer stands in a singular position, whether you 
regard him as an Englishman or as a philosopher. Eng¬ 
lishman he is, but how unlike Locke or Berkeley, with 
their classical limitations of outlook and of inquiry, with 
their doubtful attitude towards researches that lay beyond 
the circle of their immediate interests, with their unwill¬ 
ingness to apply philosophy to more than a few problems. 


296 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Mr. Spencer in his position amongst English thinkers is 
so far more like Hobbes. The whole range of problems 
seems to concern him. He attempts fearlessly the most 
stupendous of tasks. He would unify science. His pro¬ 
vince is the world of experience in its entirety. He is 
fond of mentioning in the same sentence or paragraph 
nebulae and starfishes, savages and molecules, the laws of 
motion and the institutions of Europe. Nor is this wide 
range chosen by him because of mere waywardness, or 
from the mere love of variety in illustration. He men¬ 
tions all these things because he seems to himself to have 
a formula for them. Unlike Hobbes he is, on the other 
hand, in his fondness for the letter of this formula itself, in 
his fearlessness about the use of highly abstract phrases, 
in his endless repetitions and illustrations of a few princi¬ 
pal aspects of his fundamental thought. All this, I say, 
this combination of universality of purpose with abstract¬ 
ness of expression, is an un-English trait in Mr. Spencer. 
It allies him so far with Hegel, and with the other inven¬ 
tors of world-embracing formulas. An Englishman who 
writes on philosophy usually loves the Socratic fashion of 
posing as a plain man of simple undertakings and of 
obvious ideas. Mr. Spencer speaks rather as one having 
authority. If you criticise him, he replies that you have 
failed to comprehend the subtlety and the many-sidedness 
of his thought. He does not reply as Socrates or as 
Berkeley would have done, that it is the critic who is too 
subtle and artificial to grasp the concrete ideas of a plain 
man. On the contrary, Mr. Spencer, more after the 
fashion of Hegel, knows that his formula is only for 
trained minds, like his own, for men who, like himself, 
have lived long amidst deep contemplations, and who are 
accustomed to world-compelling synthetic thought. In 
this synthetic character of his thought, again, that seems 
to give him a place amongst the characteristic thinkers of 
this our third period of modern philosophy. As we have 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 297 

now repeatedly seen, the great business of modern thought 
is the discovery of the unity of apparently diverse lines of 
investigation, the reconciliation of seemingly hopeless con¬ 
tradictions, the unification of the world which anarchical 
passion and analytic reflection have conspired to rend 
asunder. And Mr. Spencer undertakes everywhere to be 
a reconciler, an unifier, one who harmonizes through syn¬ 
thesis, and who brings to light oppositions only to enrich 
thought by suggesting their organic unity. Science and 
religion, empiricism and rationalism, Locke and Kant, 
egoism and altruism, mechanism and evolution, nature 
and history, — such are some of the seemingly opposing 
forces that he would critically reunite, even in the act of 
dwelling upon their warfare. His world, too, is rent by 
great conflicts; but its unity is to be more than its con¬ 
flicts. Mr. Spencer’s great popular reputation is largely 
due to this organizing spirit that everywhere shows itself 
in his writings. That, again, is why young men love him 
so intensely. And their love is so far well suggested by 
his imposing dignity of enterprise. His categories, mean¬ 
while, look so much more empirical and concrete than 
Hegel’s, or than those of other similar philosophic unifiers. 
The redistribution of matter and motion is so much more 
scientific-sounding a phrase for the description of the pro¬ 
cess of nature than is Hegel’s notion of the absolute. The 
passage from the indefinite and homogeneous to the defi¬ 
nite and heterogeneous, which Mr. Spencer makes the 
type of all cosmical evolution, is so much more readily 
conceivable than is Hegel’s Negativitat. But one thus 
indeed forgets, as one reads, that over every statement of 
Mr. Spencer’s about the outer world broods that dim and 
shadowy Unknowable of his, whose mystery gives to every 
assertion about the unity of its own processes an air of 
doubt and of unintelligibility. In the same breath Mr. 
Spencer, in fact, seems to assure you that he knows all and 
nothing about this unity of scientific truth. The real outer 


298 « THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

world is according to him this Unknowable itself. The 
Absolute is an impenetrable mystery. Consciousness cam 
not transcend its own boundaries. The limitation of know¬ 
ledge is thus for Mr. Spencer the tragic defeat of the high¬ 
est purpose of knowledge. Human thought will never 
reach its real goal, and that, not because human thought is 
merely unfinished, but because genuine knowledge of outer 
truth is in its very essence inconceivable, contradictory, 
hopeless. Yet all the while Mr. Spencer has that univer¬ 
sal formula, namely, his law of evolution. And this for¬ 
mula shall be true, and true about objective nature, about a 
real world, about something that does transcend conscious¬ 
ness. Idealistic constructions of the absolute shall be 
impossible, just because the absolute is unknowable. 
But unification of science, an empirical construction of an 
universally valid and objective law, shall be possible, 
although the outer truth is essentially unknowable. 

This well-known paradox of Mr. Spencer’s is extremely 
characteristic of the halting attitude of much contempo¬ 
rary thought. As for the Unknowable itself, we shall 
have something to say of it hereafter, in the second part 
of our course. For the present one may note, as an 
historical fact, that both doubters and mystery-mongers 
(of whom our time is full) often take an almost equal 
delight in Mr. Spencer’s theory of the Unknowable: the 
one class because they perceive that he, too, doubts, the 
other class because they find in Mr. Spencer’s vague 
speech, as to this matter, words that arouse their most 
religiously unutterable longings and croonings. Kant’s 
things in themselves were, indeed, somewhat similar to 
this Unknowable; yet they were at least sharply distin¬ 
guished from the knowable phenomena. All that Kant 
ever pretended, even provisionally or partially, to “ unify ” 
was the world of the inner life. But in Mr. Spencer’s 
doctrine it is our knowledge of the outer world which is 
to be “ unified; ” and yet this outer, as such, cannot truly 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 299 

be known save as to the bare fact of its existence. The 
union of knowable and unknowable in Mr. Spencer’s sys¬ 
tem is thus a painfully corrupt one. “ Reconciled ” they 
are in the system much as science and religion are recon¬ 
ciled at the outset of the “ First Principles.” In case of 
most of Mr. Spencer’s “ reconciliations,” the opposing 
interests are, in fact, first more or less developed, and then 
deliberately ignored. The reconciled terms and interests 
enter into the reconciling formula, much as the dead in 
Job’s lamentation enter Sheol, and find peace: “ The 
small and the great are there, and the servant is free 
from his master.” “ The prisoners rest together, they 
hear not the voice of the oppressor.” “ The wicked cease 
from troubling and the weary are at rest.” So, I say, are 
the great interests of humanity, the great problems of 
philosophy, the concerns of science, and the passions of 
religion, at rest in the dim recesses of the Spencerian 
formulas. 

One of the most noteworthy and valuable features of 
Mr. Spencer’s thought, meanwhile, in its influence upon 
our age, is seen in the curious fact of the actual fruitful¬ 
ness for modern discussion of some of his very vaguest 
formulas. Mr. Spencer lives in a time when no accent of 
the Holy Ghost fails to reach the ear of some breathless 
listener. So hungry is this our modern world for truth 
that the least hint suggests to it a feast of insight. And 
that is why Mr. Spencer’s comprehensive syntheses have 
been so significant for many minds, and, despite their 
vagueness, will have a part in the outcome of human phi¬ 
losophy. The whole doctrine of Mr. Spencer remains, to 
my mind, a vast programme of a philosophy of evolution. 
The author’s idea, namely, to give a general account of 
the nature of the historical process as such, is a great 
idea. I do not find in his actual formula anything at all 
successful or satisfying. The processes of differentiation 
and of integration, which he tries to describe and unite in 


300 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


this formula, are ill universalized through his famous defi¬ 
nition of evolution. Not all historical processes are de¬ 
scribed by even these abstract terms. Still less are all 
the processes that his formula includes historical in their 
nature. But still the thought of the whole, which is the 
thought that the world of natural mechanism must be 
shown to be also, in another aspect of its nature, histori¬ 
cal, is a deep and thoroughly modern thought, and that 
is the thought which I believe to be the outcome of the 
whole work of the century. 


VII. 

Outside of the circle of the special teachings of Mr. 
Spencer we find, meanwhile, a group of doctrines which 
make a more or less serious effort at being philosophical, 
and which retain of idealism only a few fragmentary ele¬ 
ments. But these doctrines are withal so significant of 
our age and of its problems, that I should do ill, even in 
this fragmentary sketch, if I wholly failed to characterize 
them. I allude to the doctrines best known by the very 
general epithet, Monistic. In them the idealistic tradi¬ 
tion still lives, but in an unconscious fashion. The coy 
doctrine of the world as spirit, pursued too hotly by 
former lovers, has been metamorphosed, and now survives 
in a sort of Daphne-like slumber, under such names as 
the Mind-Stuff theory, or the doctrine of the Double 
Aspect. Readers of modern discussion are not unfa¬ 
miliar with such statements as that the doctrine of evolu¬ 
tion has taught us the “ Oneness of all Existence; ” this 
oneness meaning that the world is somehow made of one 
stuff, and that this stuff is at once essentially physical 
and essentially mental in its qualities. Schopenhauer, 
whose real system was at heart a much more subtle and 
profound doctrine than much of this modern monism, 
used phrases that already suggest its formulas. The will, 
he used to say, is just nature’s physical causation “ seen 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 301 

from within; ” while the laws of nature are the will “ seen 
from without.” Using this phrase, and avoiding Scho¬ 
penhauer’s own systematic context for the phrase, many 
recent thinkers have sought to reconcile science and phi¬ 
losophy after much the following fashion: — 

Nature, they say, shows us material processes, subject 
to fixed law. Matter is known to be real, for experience 
tells us so. The idealistic views of post-Kantian thought 
are mere romances. Kant’s own subjectivism was unsci¬ 
entific. The real world first appears as the physical world, 
full of matter in motion. But now what is this matter 
in motion ? Experience makes clear that in certain very 
highly complex organisms, and, in particular, in the nerve- 
centres of these organisms, certain masses of matter exhibit 
mental characteristics, so that here molecular motion is 
accompanied by consciousness. The more highly organ¬ 
ized the nerve-centres in question, the higher the con¬ 
sciousness ; the simpler the organism, the simpler the 
consciousness, until, low in the scale, we come to what 
seem to be unconscious organisms, and lower still, to what 
seems to be inanimate matter. The doctrine of evolution 
teaches us that the transition from lower to higher has 
been, so far as the material processes are concerned, a 
continuous process. The more complex has evolved from 
the simpler. The organisms that possess consciousness 
are the offspring of an ancestry which in earlier stages of 
evolution would have seemed to possess none. Moreover, 
each conscious individual, in his growth from the egg, 
passes from the condition of a little mass of protoplasm 
to the condition of a knowing and thinking being. As 
matter organizes, mind gives evidence of its presence. 
As the brain disintegrates in old age or in disease, mind 
alters or disappears. What now is the meaning, the out¬ 
come, of all these facts ? Is it not this ? As the material 
elements of the brain existed before the brain, and came 
together to form it, so the elements of the mind existed 


802 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


apart from and before the conscious mind itself, and by 
their synthesis have produced it. And what, once more, 
can this mean ? Does it not signify that the elements of 
the mind and the elements of the brain are not two sorts 
of substance, but one ; that the consciousness is, as it 
were, only the inner aspect of that which, seen from with¬ 
out, appears as the brain; and that each atom of the 
brain is only the representative, in the world of physics, of 
that which, otherwise viewed, is in its essence an element 
of the mind? The world that the doctrine of evolution 
shows us is, in fact, a world of one continuous process. 
At one end of this process we find what seems to be dead 
matter. At the other end we find, say in our own inner 
life, what seems to be pure mind. How can one process 
show such different things ? Yet the continuity of the 
process, its persistence through all the ages of the evolu¬ 
tion of our planet, the absence of proof of external inter¬ 
ference, all these indicate that there must have been one 
real stuff present throughout, despite the variety of its 
manifestations. The various manifestations must then be 
only in seeming and not in ultimate foundation various. 
The so-called dead matter was always in essence mental. 
The consciousness known to us in our inner life has that 
physical aspect which the observer calls our brain. The 
same substance it is, then, that “ seen from within ” ap¬ 
pears as mind, and that “ seen from without ” is called 
matter. 

A well-known passage of M. Taine’s book on “ The In¬ 
tellect ” uses, to state this doctrine, the figure of a text 
and interlinear translation, which, in the book of nature, 
appear in some places side by side, as the two series: the 
mental and the physical phenomena of the world. In 
some regions the text only appears to the observer (as 
each one of us, and he only, knows his own inner life) ; 
while elsewhere, as in our observation of “ dead ” matter, 
only the translation appears to us, not the text. The in- 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 30B 

ference is that, mutilated as our copy of the text may be, 
both text and translation are meant in the original of our 
book to be parallel, correspondent, and, in deepest sense, 
one. This, then, is the theory of Monism, as the doctrine 
of evolution has suggested it to many recent thinkers. 

In further development the expressions of the doctrine 
differ widely. The lamented Clifford, in one of the most 
brilliant of his essays, that on “ Mind-Stuff,” gave to 
modern monism one of its most suggestive formulations. 
Independently, Dr. Morton Prince, of Boston, in a book 
on “ The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism,” 
reached, a number of years since, the same thought. So 
stated, monism declares that the real stuff of the world 
is not an unknown somewhat, an cc, that when viewed as 
we view our own states appears as mind, and that when 
viewed from without appears as matter. On the con¬ 
trary, this real stuff of things is, for Clifford and for Dr. 
Prince, nothing but mind itself, known to us directly and 
in its true essence when we know our own feelings, known 
to us indirectly and obscurely when it is formed of the 
feelings that are not ours, and that, affecting our feelings 
from without, are represented therein by our ideas of 
material things beyond us. The world is thus in reality 
mind, but not of necessity conscious mind, rather only a 
vast congeries of elementary feelings, out of which, when 
they come into close relations to one another, as they do 
in our organisms, complex mental life, and finally con¬ 
sciousness, can be and is made. The process of evolution 
is the process of the organization of this mind-stuff. The 
laws of nature’s mechanism are the laws of the relations 
of mind-stuff atoms ; and there is but this one stuff in 
all things. 

Other lovers of this modern monism are not always so 
simple in their formulations. To many the truth of the 
doctrine lies in the thought that matter and mind are sim¬ 
ply diverse aspects of one ultimate substantial stuff. But 


304 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


what this is, conscious or unconscious, feeling or not-feel- 
ing, we are not to know. The true stuff is an x with two 
faces, a substance more like Spinoza’s, whose two attri¬ 
butes, material and physical, we comprehend by experi¬ 
ence, but whose essence is only made articulate for us in 
terms of these its attributes. 

Such is a suggestion of this, one of the best-known ten¬ 
dencies of recent speculation. You see its tentative and 
empirical character; you see its close relation to the doc¬ 
trine of evolution; you see also how far it is from meet¬ 
ing the critical requirements that, since Kant, are neces¬ 
sarily made of a philosophy. This naive acceptance of 
the possibility that out of a mass of feelings you can build 
up a self, this faith that feelings can somehow “ come to¬ 
gether ” or “ organize themselves,” when we know of no 
such thing in experience as a loose feeling out of organ¬ 
ization at all, or apart from the unity of a self, this belief 
in the “ oneness ” of things on the basis of an uncriticised 
experience, — all these things make modern empirical 
monism rather a suggestion than a philosophy. In some 
ways, as you will later see, I prize it highly and make use 
of its insight. I cannot rest content with it. 

VIII. 

Herewith ends my sketch of the rise of the doctrine of 
evolution. Of the positive significance of the doctrine 
for philosophy, a later discussion must say something. And 
herewith, as sometimes before in my lectures, I lay aside 
the attitude of the mere chronicler; only this time I lay 
it aside finally and altogether. We have traveled a long 
road in company ; w~e have now, at last, reached the prob¬ 
lems of the present day. Heretofore I have tried to tell 
a story, — in my own words indeed, generally with my 
own illustrations, often in so untechnical a fashion as to 
run the risk of leaving my author sadly misunderstood ; 
but always with a desire to let the history in some fashion 
unfold its own inner meaning, display its own continuity, 


TEE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 305 

and furnish its own criticism of the errors and partial 
insights which we have encountered. You have seen 
throughout, I suppose, where my sympathies have been ly¬ 
ing ; at the outset I confessed to you the nature of my own 
philosophical creed; and on several occasions, especially 
in recent lectures, I have freely supplemented history by 
personal expressions of opinion. But from this time forth 
I am no longer to be a chronicler who frequently criti¬ 
cises, but a student who risks his own positive creed for 
whatever it may prove to be worth. The substance of this 
creed I shall in the concluding lectures suggest, with spe¬ 
cial reference to the point that we have now reached in 
our study. I shall try to make my doctrine the legitimate 
outcome of the reflective process that I have been de¬ 
scribing to you. I am, as you now know, an idealist. I 
find Kant’s analysis of our knowledge in its essence the 
true one. Kant erred chiefly in what he omitted to ana¬ 
lyze, and in his assumption of those useless things in 
themselves. As far as his deeper study of the inner life 
of the intellect went, he was on his own ground, and he 
knew it wonderfully well, for all his burden of technical 
subtleties and for all his pedantic schematism. He held 
that space and time are mental. To my mind this is un¬ 
questionable. He held that all judgment is essentially 
only an appeal to my own deeper Self, and that all know¬ 
ledge depends on my unity with my deeper Self. This 
seems to me the profoundest truth of philosophy. What 
Kant did not make clear was what this, my deeper Self, 
is. It certainly is n’t my empirically conscious self. It 
certainly is n’t the person called by my individual name. 
I find in the later idealists many suggestions as to what 
this deeper Self is. I am very fond, as you have seen, of 
Hegel’s tragic but highly vital formula for the paradox 
of consciousness, the struggle of self-knowledge and self- 
mastery, as the very life of this passionate deeper Self. 
I do not, however, think that Hegel has told the whole 
truth about the Self. I find great interest in saying, with 


306 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Schopenhauer, that to know the Self we must first watch it 
as it plays the world-game, not as if the facts of the world 
were ever really external to thought, but because the 
deeper Self, although one, needs an infinity of sense-facts 
to express its will, and writes its ideas in a vast hiero¬ 
glyph, whose characters we call experience. Hence it is 
* that I love to study science. And when I study science 
I do so naively, submissively, straightforwardly, just as if 
the atoms and the suns and the milky-ways, the brains and 
the nerve-cells and the reflex mechanisms, were all things 
in themselves. They are n’t things in themselves; they 
are mere manifestations of the Self. But I must for this 
very reason accept them as they come. Nor do I try, as 
the romanticists did, to find obvious symbolic interpre¬ 
tations for hastily recorded facts of sense before cau¬ 
tious science has scrutinized these facts thoroughly. I 
have confidence enough in the depth of meaning that the 
Self has to embody in the world, not to try to guess this 
meaning of its hieroglyph before a good deal thereof has 
been empirically examined. I do not grow restive in lis¬ 
tening to the story of evolution, merely because I am 
well aware that the whole temporal view of things is 
largely illusory, and that the true Self, far from being 
subject to time, creates time. I rather delight in this 
craft whereby the Self thus hides its true nature in ener¬ 
getic nebulous masses and in flying meteors, pretends to 
be absent from the inorganic world, pretends to have de¬ 
scended from relatives of the anthropoid apes, pretends, 
in short, to be bounded in all sorts of nutshells; yes, 
plays hide and seek amongst the aeons of forgotten time, 
when this planet was not, and demurely insists that with¬ 
out phosphorus it could not possibly have learned how to 
think. The Self has its comedies as well as its tragedies; 
and these comedies are as far from being mere farces as 
the tragedies are from being the mere horror-plays at 
which Schopenhauer’s saints turned pale, until they grew 
ineffectively holy, and finally vanished. No, the com- 


THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 30T 

edies are as deep as the tragedies. The Self is as truly 
present in evolution as he is in sin and in ignorance. 
These are the World-Spirit’s garments that we see him by. 
Only we must see patiently, watching every fold and lis¬ 
tening to every rustle of the garment; for behind this 
garment stirs the infinite life, and to each one of us 
philosophy says, That art Thou. It is only after a pa¬ 
tient scientific scrutiny has revealed, as is the case with 
the doctrine of evolution, a vast unity in a long series of 
phenomena; a growth like this which links civilized to sav¬ 
age man; and savage man to an animal ancestry; and the 
animal ancestry to unicellular organisms ; and these to the 
inorganic matter of a primitive earth-crust; and this crust 
to an antecedent fluid earth-ball, glowing, and parting 
with its bulky satellite, the moon \ and this glowing ball to 
a primitive nebula; and perhaps this nebula to a previous 
manifold streaming of multitudinously clashing meteors, 
— it is only then, I say, when such a book as this splen¬ 
did history of life lies open before us, only partly deci¬ 
phered, but still suggestively grasped in its magnificent 
outlines, daily more clearly read by science, that we have 
a right to ask: Who, then, is this Self, and what man¬ 
ner of life is this he writes in this book, itself merely a 
waif from the lost tales of endless time, just as the end¬ 
less time also is merely an illusory form wherein the Self 
is pleased to embody and manifest this truth ? Its illu¬ 
sory form is not wholly an illusion. For the Self is all 
that is, and his world is the chosen outcome of his eter¬ 
nal reality. Beyond all these illusions must lie a mean¬ 
ing deeper than we have ever yet comprehended, higher 
than our thought will soon reach. What fragment, then, 
of the meaning does the story of evolution convey ? To 
give that question a precise definition and to risk a sharp 
answer, to make this answer less mystical and more con¬ 
crete than the one now suggested, and to develop before 
you something of its proof, will be my business in the 
remaining lectures. 





PART n. 


SUGGESTIONS OF DOCTRINE. 




LECTUKE X. 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION; THE OUTER WORLD AND ITS 
PARADOX. 

We begin herewith the task of thinking for ourselves 
concerning the problems of philosophy. We shall have 
learned little from the preceding historical discussions, if 
they have not strongly suggested to us that the world of 
truth must be something very unlike the naive notions 
of its nature that our primitive consciousness gives us. 
Empirical science is full of romantic surprises; but phi¬ 
losophy has shown itself to be far more so. Copernicus 
transformed the universe for the natural man; but Kant’s 
“ Copernican discovery ” suggested a far more wondrous 
transformation. Our own work we have defined in ad¬ 
vance as an effort to bring into synthesis the thoughts 
that the history of modern philosophy has suggested to 
us. Following, then, in the paths of Kant and of his 
successors, we shall not expect to get glimpses of less 
marvelous things than they beheld. What we desire is 
that these insights of ours should be reasonable, and 
should be adjusted to the facts of life and of nature. 


i. 

It is the world of the outer order in which our histori¬ 
cal studies have left us. The idealistic interpretation of 
this world that I suggested as I closed the last lecture 
will not at first sight appear to you more than a mystical 
romance. Let it pass, for the moment, as such. I shall 
not here begin with it; I shall begin with the assumption 
of realistic science, with the hypothesis of our own age, 


312 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


namely, that there is a real world, which our senses more 
or less truly perceive, which a well-guarded experience 
can fruitfully investigate, and which our natural science 
has been learning in some measure to comprehend. This 
assumption is one presupposition of our age. We shall 
study it as critically as we can. If it needs a peculiarly 
cautious scrutiny, if it lacks in any sense foundation, or 
if it must be transformed before it can be accepted, we 
shall hope to discover the fact in the course of our 
analysis. 

That, once granting the foregoing presupposition, the 
reflection of a metaphysician should have any rights as 
against the stupendous acquisitions of the sciences of ex¬ 
perience, would seem at first glance absurd enough, were 
it not that the highest flights of science are precisely the 
ones that, to reflective persons, are always most suggestive 
of the need of a philosophy. At the close of the remark¬ 
able address of the president of the British Association 
at Cardiff (delivered in August, 1891), I find noteworthy 
words, concluding a presentation of the recent marvels of 
the progress of astronomy : — 

“ Astronomy, the oldest of the sciences,” says Dr. Hug¬ 
gins, “ has more than renewed her youth. At no time in 
the past has she been so bright with unbounded aspira¬ 
tions and hopes. Never were her temples so numerous, 
nor the crowd of her votaries so great. . . . Happy is the 
lot of those who are still on the eastern side of life’s meri¬ 
dian. . . . Since the time of Newton our knowledge of 
the phenomena of nature has wonderfully increased, but 
man asks, perhaps more earnestly now than in his days, 
What is the ultimate reality behind the reality of the per¬ 
ceptions ? Are they only the pebbles of the beach with 
which we have been playing? Does not the ocean of 
ultimate reality and truth lie beyond ? ” 

Let these words of Dr. Huggins be the text of what is 
immediately to follow. The more one becomes absorbed 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


313 


in the study of the wonders of nature, the nearer must 
lie the thought, that these things are not what they seem; 
that space and time, and matter and motion, and life and 
our human consciousness, are but the show, the finite em¬ 
bodiment, the temporal manifestation, of a deeper truth. 
If this world of experience is indeed real, its reality must 
be far profounder than our experience. May not an analy¬ 
sis of the conditions of experience suggest to us wherein 
lies this profounder actuality, behind the show, and yet 
incorporated in it ? 

This world of scientific realism is first of all a world 
in space and in time. Space and time are themselves, as 
Kant has shown us, such puzzling conditions of natural 
law and of human knowledge, that we should run the 
risk of complicating hopelessly our inquiry if we here 
already dwelt afresh upon their paradoxes. Let us post¬ 
pone such a consideration until later; let us look rather 
at the contents of the space world, as experience shows 
them to us. In space we find the universe of the stars 
and the nebulae, as the world wherein occur all the 
changes that fall within our ken. These changes, as 
physical science knows them, are, to use the well-known 
phrase, “ redistributions ” of matter and of energy. So 
far as we know, neither matter nor energy is ever altered 
in quantity. It is their distribution, the form of the 
physical world, which changes. As for the general ex¬ 
tent and character of these changes, the astronomer tells 
us (to quote once more from Dr. Huggins’s address) 
something of the following nature : — 

“ The heavens are richly but very irregularly inwrought 
with stars; the brighter stars cluster into well-known 
groups upon a background formed of an enlacement of 
streams and convoluted windings and interwined spirals 
of fainter stars, which becomes richer and more intricate 
in the irregularly rifted zone of the Milky Way. 

“We who form part of the emblazonry can see only 


814 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the design distorted and confused; here crowded, ther& 
scattered, at another place superposed. The groupings 
due to our position are mixed up with those which are 
real. 

“ Can we suppose that each luminous point has no rela¬ 
tion to the others near it than the accidental neighborship 
of grains of sand upon the shore, or particles of the wind¬ 
blown dust of the desert ? Surely every star, from Sirius 
and Vega down to each grain of the light dust of the 
Milky Way, has its present place in the heavenly pattern 
from the slow evolving of its past. We see a system of 
systems, for the broad features of clusters and streams 
and spiral windings which mark the general design are 
reproduced in every part. The whole is in motion, each 
point shifting its position by miles every second, though 
from the august magnitude of their distances from us and 
from each other, it is only by the accumulated movements 
of years or of generations that some small changes of 
relative position reveal themselves.” 

A “ system of systems,” then, with the “ broad fea¬ 
tures” “ reproduced in every part,” is before us. Its very 
outlines suggest a general process of physical evolution. 
This impression is after a fashion confirmed by two well- 
known considerations, one of which is relatively older in 
science, while the other is at the moment in process of 
highly novel development through spectroscopic research. 
The first consideration relates to the fact that the energy 
of this vast material system is now distributed in a man¬ 
ner that, from the nature of the case, is, so to speak, pecu¬ 
liarly unstable, and that appears to involve enormous 
future changes of distribution ; while if we look back¬ 
wards we see that there must have been involved in the 
past a long and continuous process of a particular type 
leading towards the present state. The hot stars, in cold 
space far from one another, are just now continually dissi¬ 
pating their heat by radiation. If one inquires into the 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


315 


most probable source of all this heat-energy, now so waste- 
fully poured out, one finds but one highly plausible hypo¬ 
thesis, which has been suggested after a very considerable 
study of the phenomena of our own sun. Contraction, 
under the influence of gravity, most probably furnishes 
the source of this heat in case of each of the great stellar 
masses. Contraction, read backwards, and interpreted in 
the light of the well-known and now pretty widely con¬ 
firmed nebular hypothesis, indicates that each star must 
once have been far larger than it now is, and that the 
energy now radiated as heat must once have been stored 
up as the energy of position of widely diffused matter, 
whose particles gravitated towards one another, and whoso 
state is probably indicated to us by such vast masses as 
certain of the nebulae show us. Condensation, the con¬ 
version of the energy of position into heat, radiation of 
heat, the continued contraction of stellar masses : such is 
the process that we now probably see indicated before us. 

The recent spectroscopic study of the stars furnishes a 
second and subordinate sort of evidence, which adds still 
further plausibility to the idea of this unity of process 
throughout the heavens. The stars seem, we are told, to 
fall into classes, whose physical condition strongly sug¬ 
gests, although it cannot yet prove, just such varieties of 
age, just such different stages in the process of condensa¬ 
tion and of cooling, as we might expect to discover in a 
universe of a stellar evolution of the sort that the nebular 
hypothesis demands. The confirmation from this source, 
incomplete though it is, is highly significant. 

Granting these hypotheses about the world-system around 
us, — hypotheses rendered daily more probable in the light 
of that general unity of material structure and of physical 
law which the spectroscope so wonderfully reveals, — then 
the process that is going on has a character that renders 
it very highly problematic. The energy of this system is 
being transformed, as we have seen; but the average 


316 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

transformations appear to conform to a type which sug¬ 
gests that the bright world of the hot stars, as it now is, 
must be destined to only a finite period of existence. 
These transformations, namely, are taking place in one 
direction. The energy of the stellar world seems to be 
“running down,” that is, to be passing from “available” 
to “ unavailable ” forms. The total quantity of energy 
in the world remains constant; but its serviceableness for 
continuing the world-process that we now observe and 
admire must be growing momentarily less. We cannot 
with serious probability discover any compensating pro¬ 
cess of sufficient magnitude and universality to enable us 
to see how the stellar evolution could go on forever, in 
any one part of space, however large, without an entire 
change in the character of the events involved. A rhythm 
of growth and decay, a passing of energy from “ higher ” 
to “ lower ” forms, and then back again from “ lower ” to 
“ higher ” forms, in case that were the law of the process 
before us, would suggest an ultimately stable “ moving 
equilibrium ” in the universe, whose “ broad features,” 
“ reproduced in every part,” would be those of an endless 
life of ripening and decaying solar and stellar systems. 
But unfortunately, the greater part of the energy involved 
in this world of the hot stars and the cold space no sooner 
reaches the form of heat energy, shown in the glowing 
stellar surfaces themselves, than it is radiated off into 
space; and there is nothing rhythmical, so far as we can 
see, about the results of the process of radiation. The 
fashion of this world changes; and no restoring process 
adequately compensates for the change. The stellar uni¬ 
verse continually casts this bread of its energy on to the 
waters of infinite space. When shall it be found again ? 
To speak of the facts more particularly, each star tends 
to cool off, since it is radiating enormous quantities of 
heat. What can supply the loss, and keep the star hot ? 
The answer is, that the contraction of each stellar mass, 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


317 


by reason of gravitation, continually converts energy of 
position into heat-energy. But in no single case could this 
contraction go on indefinitely. The stars that we know 
must one and all grow old and die. What could restore 
life to the cooling universe ? Collisions of stellar masses ? 
These in any one case would bring to pass enormous dif¬ 
fusions of matter, would form fresh nebulae, would begin 
the vast processes of single systems once more; but would 
do so only by drawing afresh on the store of the higher 
forms of energy (that is, upon the energy of position and 
the energy of relative stellar motions). The energy thus 
won, and made available, would be radiated off in the 
end; would be lost in the depths of space; and the pro¬ 
cess would continue only at a loss. 

This law of the “ degradation ” of energy, of the ten¬ 
dency everywhere for higher forms of energy, such as 
those of the energy of position and the energy of the mo¬ 
tion of masses of matter, to pass, when transformed, into 
the lower form of energy, namely, heat, and then to be 
radiated off into space, is a well-known tendency, present 
in all sorts of physical processes. Only at a certain loss 
can heat-energy be transformed back into higher forms 
of energy, even by the best of known devices. Heat wa¬ 
ter, here at the earth’s surface, and you can make steam, 
and get the steam to raise bodies to higher levels, and so 
get some of your heat-energy stored up once more in forms 
that will be later “ available ” for useful service. But you 
can do so only at a loss. In order to transform some of 
the heat-energy at your disposal into a higher and more 
useful form, you have to waste a good deal of heat, by let¬ 
ting it heat up the bodies in the neighborhood of the 
water that you use, and by so letting it ultimately diffuse 
itself through space by radiation. Lost heat you can’t 
restore. Energy you employ, then, only by giving part of 
it away as waste heat, and using the remainder to do your 
work. That seems to be the way of our universe. Its 


318 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

energies continually diffuse themselves through infinite 
space in “ degraded ” form as ether vibrations. The stars 
waste vastly more than they can give to their planets. 
And even what they give to their planets is continually 
being lost, as our own earth shows us, through radiation. 

If, then, this stellar universe possesses at present any 
finite quantity of “ kinetic ” or of “ potential ” energy in 
available undiffused forms, that is, if the process before 
us is confined to any finite portion of space, then the 
energy seems to be so tending to lose itself in diffused 
form, that in some finite time the whole process must 
“ run down.” The evolution must cease. 

So, at least, it would seem. The problem as suggested 
to us in the other direction is obvious. If this evolution 
must sometime cease, how, carrying it backwards, can we 
conceive it as having been without a beginning? A 
rhythmical process, in which there is a regular alterna¬ 
tion of certain conditions, can easily be conceived as hav¬ 
ing always existed. Look back, namely, as far as you 
will, and you will find this process present at any moment 
of time, in some stage of its endlessly repeated rhythm. 
But a physical process that shall have gone on through 
endless time, and yet always in the same direction, an 
endless wasting of energy by the continual conversion of 
higher into lower forms, — how hard to conceive of such 
a process as having already gone on forever! The only 
plausible hypothesis that makes such a conception possible 
seems at first sight to be the one discussed by Professor 
W. K. Clifford, in his brilliant lecture on “ The First and 
Last Catastrophe.” 1 In order to follow Clifford’s thought, 
let us fix our attention for a moment on the case of the 
earth. If, says Clifford, we follow back the probable con¬ 
dition of the earth itself, we find that, according to cer¬ 
tain computations, this planet must have solidified a lim- 

1 See his Lectures and Essays, vol. i. pp. 191-227 ; in particular, 
the passages, pp. 220, 221. 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


319 


ited number of millions of years since. “ Before that, it 
was cooling as a liquid.” And before this again, further 
computations would show that, at a certain time, the earth 
had passed from the gaseous to the liquid state. And 
then, continues Clifford : — 

“ If we went further back still we should probably find 
the earth falling together out of a great ring of matter 
surrounding the sun, and distributed over its orbit. The 
same thing is true of every body of matter; if we trace 
its history back, we come to a certain time at which a ca¬ 
tastrophe took place; and if we were to trace back the 
history of all the bodies in the universe in that way, we 
should continually see them separating up into smaller 
parts. What they have actually done is to fall together 
and get solid. If we could reverse the process we should 
see them separating and getting fluid; and, as a limit to 
that, at an indefinite distance in past time, we should find 
that all these bodies would be resolved into molecules, 
and all these would be flying away from each other. 
There would be no limit to that process, and we could 
trace it as far back as ever we liked to trace it. So that 
on the assumption — a very large assumption — that the 
present constitution of the laws of geometry and mechanics 
has held good during the whole of past time, we should be 
led to the conclusion that, at an inconceivably long time 
ago, the universe did consist of ultimate molecules, all 
separate from one another and approaching one another. 
Then they would meet together and form a great number 
of small, hot bodies. Then you would have the process 
of cooling going on in these bodies, exactly as we find it 
going on now. But you will observe that we have no evi¬ 
dence of such a catastrophe as implies a beginning of the 
laws of nature.” 

Clifford, as you will see from his words, does not regard 
this hypothesis as more than a very provisional one. All 
that we are seeking for the moment, however, is a plausi- 


320 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


ble way of regarding the world that now is as continuously 
linked with what was, and with what will be, by a world 
process that extends indefinitely both towards the past 
and towards the future. Towards the future, as we have 
seen, it is very hard to conceive the present process as 
indefinitely extended without coming to what Clifford 
himself (page 224 of the same lecture) describes thus: — 

“ If we were to travel forward, . . . and consider 
things as falling together, we should come finally to a 
great central mass, all in one piece, which would send out 
waves of heat through a perfectly empty ether, and grad¬ 
ually cool itself down. As this mass got cool it would be 
deprived of all life and motion; it would be just an 
enormous frozen block in the middle of the ether.” 

In the past, again, extending the present process back¬ 
wards, we come, as Clifford has shown us, to a condition 
of greater and greater diffusion of matter, to a state where 
more and more energy took the form of energy of position, 
and where there was less and less of the present condi¬ 
tion of stellar systems with highly heated solar surfaces. 
In both cases our effort to conceive the world-process as 
one process is founded, as Clifford points out, on the 
“ large assumption ” that the “ present constitution of the 
laws of geometry and mechanics has held good during the 
whole of past time,” or in other words that the world is 
what it now seems to be to our more exact scientific con¬ 
sciousness. The question now is whether the conception 
that we thus get is an essentially coherent one. 

At the present stage of our inquiry it would be mere 
Philistinism to dwell, as many are disposed to do, upon 
the disheartening notion of the past and future state of 
our universe which these considerations and hypotheses so 
far suggest. Our criticism of the presuppositions of mod¬ 
ern inquiry will have, in due time and place, to study the 
moral and religious aspect of the real world. But just 
now we dare not call in question hypotheses as to nature, 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 321 

merely because they do not meet the longings of our 
hearts. Our criticism must go deeper. 

Turning back at once, however, to the theoretical as¬ 
pect of the matter, we find that this conception of the 
real world is, as we have already observed, at all events 
a very highly problematic one. We may well doubt the 
ultimate coherence of these our empirical notions of the 
physical world when thus driven, as it were, to their limits, 
when pressed into service to define a possible world-pro¬ 
cess that shall include the known phenomena, and that 
shall still be continuous and boundless in time. Yet not 
in vain will have been our efforts so far if we take into 
account a consideration that just now becomes highly im¬ 
portant for us. 

There is, namely, no more useful experiment in philo¬ 
sophy than just such an effort as the one now before us, 
to universalize our conceptions of things, to try what be¬ 
comes of them when we do pass to the limit, and suppose 
them true for all the world and for all time. Such an 
experiment often is for philosophy what a crucial test in 
a laboratory is for physics. It decides for us, namely, 
what sort of conception we are dealing with; and that is 
why these speculations are worth our while. A concep¬ 
tion that could consistently be thus universalized, that 
could be used to define an absolute or a self-completed 
world-process, that thus could have an essentially bound¬ 
less application, might be a conception of an objective 
and well-founded type, true of the real world apart from 
our merely human point of view. But a conception that 
you can’t universalize, that seems to contradict itself, or 
that gives rise to highly suspicious incongruities, so soon 
as you press it to the limit, so soon as you suppose it to 
apply semper et ubique , is thereby shown to be in all prob¬ 
ability a conception of an essentially human character or 
else of no world-wide objectivity. It may have truth 
about it, but this truth will in part be due to our own 


322 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

limited point of view, to our particular station in the uni¬ 
verse. This notion will be, so to speak, a mortal concep¬ 
tion of things, not a conception of a really eternal truth. 
For example : the notion of the earth as supported by 
an elephant that stood on a tortoise was such an essen¬ 
tially transient and merely human conception, just because 
it was derived from the analogy of a very special and 
limited experience of ours, and was obviously incapable of 
true universalization. Seeking to pass to the limit, you 
found yourself in a world whose law was that all things 
needed support from beneath, while you could never find 
a real supporter in the world, whether for the earth or 
for anything else. For any supporter in your world-series 
would be such only in so far as he was first conceived 
to be supported. And so as no unsupported supporter 
could be found in a series thus defined, while an unsup¬ 
ported supporter would be essentially needed somewhere 
to give all above him a real foundation, the defined series 
would be worthless for the purpose of explaining the 
earth’s apparent stability. Yery different, however, is 
the conception (a purely ideal one, to be sure) of the 
stability of a gravitative system in otherwise absolutely 
empty space, — a system that should consist, say, of a sun 
and a planet, both moving with perfect freedom about 
their common centre of gravity, both uninfluenced by 
disturbances from without, and both rigid and homogene¬ 
ous spherical bodies. Such a system, although it does not 
exist in our physical world, can be conceived as existing. 
Such a system, moreover, under the law of gravity, would 
give us an endless rhythmic change of position on the 
part of its members, the small planet revolving in an 
established orbit about its large sun, or rather both mov¬ 
ing about their common centre. The motion in question 
would be a stable one. There would be no difficulty in 
predicting the position, velocity, and acceleration of the 
planet at any time, from its position and motion at any 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


323 


other. The possible positions of the planet in its orbit 
would form a closed curve. One complete cycle of the 
system would exhaustively exemplify all, and would not 
be in need of a support or explanation from any source 
outside the system. The motion in an universe so consti¬ 
tuted would be, as defined, essentially endless. In this 
empty space no physical condition could have produced or 
begun it; and nothing could end it. The conception of 
such an universe is essentially self-completed, and so as 
an universe possible. Such an universe, then, although it 
is not real, might be real. The universe where the stabil¬ 
ity of things was only to be explained by such a notion 
as that of the earth supported by elephant and tortoise, 
can't be real; for either elephant and tortoise, as con¬ 
ceived, would not be real supporters at all, or else if they 
were, then, like the conceived earth itself, they would need 
support ere they could become supporters, whilst in the 
world as so conceived they could find no ultimate support 
whatever. 

I exemplify this rather abstruse-seeming distinction 
between essentially coherent and essentially incoherent 
notions of the universe in its wholeness, not for the sake 
of involving my argument in unnecessary subtlety, but 
for the sake of preparing the way for what seems to me a 
not unimportant step forwards in our- discussion. 

ii. 

No one doubts the validity of the foregoing inductions 
of physical science when judged by their own presupposi¬ 
tions, and taken within their chosen limits. But they are 
confessedly inductions about the world as it seems. As 
they are originally made, they therefore do not profess to 
give us a theory about the ultimately real world. It is our 
own reflective interest that has now suggested to us the 
mere experiment of seeing whether the conceptions that 
these inductions involve are capable of being universalized, 


824 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


of being pressed to the limit, and whether they remain 
coherent when this is hypothetically done. The purpose 
of the experiment is to see whether the world as it seems 
to outer experience can really be viewed as a fair speci¬ 
men of the world as it really is. 

Supposing this process of the aggregation of matter 
and the radiation of energy into space to be a specimen 
of the ultimately real process of nature, can we, with Clif¬ 
ford, regard this as a process that, uncertainties apart, 
can without incoherence be conceived as boundless in 
time? As an example of a hypothetical process that 
can be so conceived, we have just had the case of the 
ideal system of rigid sun and planet, alone in space and 
changeless in inner physical structure. Their rhythm 
would be a perfect one. Their motion would occur in 
closed cycles. Beginning or end of their process would 
be physically unintelligible. An universe that contained 
them and them only would be logically as well as physi¬ 
cally complete. No evolution would occur there ; and 
none would be needed or conceivable. Is our seeming 
world that is now one of a “ running-down ” energy, con¬ 
stant in quantity, but such that it is tending to “ degrada¬ 
tion ” in form, a world that we can coherently conceive as 
eternal ? 

Difficulties at once occur to us. Let us put them as 
simply as possible. A process called aggregation shall 
have been endlessly going on. What stage has it now 
reached? The answer is, one of very imperfect aggre¬ 
gation. The masses of matter now coherent in the world 
before us are, despite their imposing size, after all com¬ 
paratively small. Their number is, meanwhile, compara¬ 
tively speaking, very great. Many millions of suns, — no 
sun in sight that we are forced to regard as after all so 
very much larger than our own sun. Some stars may be 
several hundreds or thousands of times the mass of our 
own sun. None, however, are big enough to show us 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


325 


across the interstellar spaces any disk. What we see 
are mere points of light. Where instead of points we see 
large nebulae, of considerable apparent area, we get evi¬ 
dence of the presence of diffused gas and perhaps, also, of 
meteor - swarms, not of highly aggregated and still ex¬ 
tremely vast masses of matter. As to the significance of 
this fact, there is indeed nothing exact, as yet, about our 
present consideration. So far it merely arouses our sus¬ 
picion. If aggregation has been going on endlessly, there 
ought to be, one would think, at least a few prodigious 
centres of aggregation, as big, say, in angular size, when 
seen even across these prodigious spaces, as the larger 
nebulae appear to us, and still as coherent at least as is 
the mass of Sirius. The small average size of the suns is 
precisely what one might expect to see if at some finite 
time in the past aggregation had begun hereabouts in 
space, the nebular gaseous matter, or the meteoric swarms, 
having at the beginning of that time filled pretty evenly 
our part of space. But this is not what our hypothesis, 
carried to the limit, pretends to suggest. Universal 
aggregation, going on wherever there was matter, — this 
is what shall have filled the endless past. And still, — 
this incomplete result! 

I repeat, I do not at all exaggerate the force of so inex¬ 
actly formulated a consideration. Clifford’s way of stat¬ 
ing his hypothetical case of a look into the past might al¬ 
ready seem to have forestalled our objection. But I give 
it this form by way of introducing later a more serious 
reflection. 

Meanwhile, a second doubt comes to mind, and this 
time with regard to the energy of our world. It shall 
have tended always towards the final state of indefinite 
degradation and dispersion. And yet there is so much of 
it still “ available! ” These stars are so hot, this store 
of energy, wasted for an infinite time, shall have left us 
after all still so far from the frozen termination of all 


326 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


evolution! Is not tliis incompleteness another cause of 
suspicion ? Can our conceptions thus be fully universal¬ 
ized without a curious inconsistency ? Ought not a pro¬ 
cess that from all eternity has taken but one direction to 
have been completed long ago ? 

But I hasten to correct these inexact considerations by 
opposing to them Clifford’s very simple way of stating 
the case for the inner coherence of our present concep¬ 
tions of natural law. What “ the bodies of the universe ” 
“ have actually done,” he says, “ is to fall together and 
get solid. If we could reverse the process we should see 
them separating, . . . and as a limit . . . at an indefinite 
distance in past time we should find that all these bodies 
would be resolved into molecules, and ” [if we read the 
process backwards] “ all these would be flying away from 
each other. There would be no limit to that process, and 
we could trace it as far back as ever we liked to trace it.” 
In this way, thinks Clifford, we should get a definable 
endless process for the physical universe. That we our¬ 
selves happen to live and to be sentient just at the mo¬ 
ment when the infinite process has reached this stage, is, 
after all, not more marvelous than that we live at all. 
Infinite past and future time being once assumed, we our¬ 
selves must of course come somewhere in the process, and 
we come just where we actually find ourselves, the pro¬ 
cess being in a peculiarly critical and transitional stage. 

But it is not our own existence that is just here the 
problem. It is the real world which thus conceived has, 
when viewed in time, a very singular character. There is 
a stage in its endless life, when, for a finite period, which 
we may call E (meaning thereby the portion of time during 
which what we call processes of evolution are possible), 
there is a considerable, but still not an extreme aggrega¬ 
tion of its matter, and yet a considerable, though not an 
extreme retention of energy of position on the part of its 
constituent masses. During this time suns and systems 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


327 


form, stars are hot, and planetary life may, as on our earth, 
be possible. Before this period lies an endless time P, a 
past when aggregation was small, but when there were 
nebulae, meteor swarms, yes, if you go far enough back, 
separated molecules. These had much energy of position, 
or of motion, or of both. They had not yet, on the aver¬ 
age, converted much of it into heat. There were in those 
times no processes of evolution possible. Then beyond 
and after the time E there is to lie an endless future F, 
wherein once more the matter is aggregated but cold, the 
energy is dispersed through space in the ether, and what 
we call evolution is over. The result is an absolute divi¬ 
sion of infinite time into the three parts: — 

<-p | e | f—:-> 

and this division shall be not merely our private and finite 
interpretation of the thing, but the truth of nature. The 
world of high temperatures, of large and rapidly condens¬ 
ing masses, of planets and suns, of all the complex nat¬ 
ural processes, electrical, magnetic, chemical, connected 
with the life of solar systems, — this world is an excep¬ 
tion in the wastes of infinite time. P contains nothing 
of the sort. F contains nothing of the sort. Only the 
select region E, of the temporal process, gives birth to 
such things. 

Now a natural process that is essentially confined to one 
part of infinite time, and that finds no place elsewhere, 
is the real anomaly with which we have so far to deal. 
We wanted to conceive nature as one process. We have 
really conceived it as a drama ip three acts, essentially 
separate in physical character from one another, despite 
the continuity of motions that joins them. This anomaly 
needs, at all events, further scrutiny. This is an odd 
world that we have got ourselves into. How odd, we shall 
in some measure comprehend only after I have taxed your 
patience with yet one more subtlety, to which I now invite 
your brief, but very careful attention. 




828 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


III. 

Whatever other difficulties this conceived world may or 
may not contain, it is sure that its boundlessness in time, 
and the fashion of its presence in boundless space, are 
of a sort very different from those which we before as¬ 
cribed to the conceived simple gravitative system consist¬ 
ing of two bodies. In the latter world, namely, there was 
always going on a certain cyclical process of one fixed 
type. The sun and its conceived planet were somehow 
there in space. Looking back as far as we liked, we 
should always find the pair occupying some one of the 
determinate relative positions that they pass through 
during their endlessly repeated cycles. Looking back¬ 
wards or forwards, therefore, we should not be driven by 
any special physical problems of this conceived world 
to puzzle ourselves about the sense in which there is any 
real infinity of space and time at all. It is true, as every¬ 
body has heard, that there are obvious and serious difficul¬ 
ties in the way of conceiving how space and time are to 
be really infinite actualities, — how, off yonder, there can 
actually exist parts of space infinitely remote from us, or 
how, looking backwards, we can say that there ever did 
occur events an infinitely long time ago. But now, as we 
see, the world of our closed cycle of planet revolving 
about sun suggests by no marked physical peculiarity of 
its processes any question about this reality of infinite 
space and infinite time as such. We have called its exis¬ 
tence boundless in time. We mean by that only that its 
supposed existence would seem to be as endless as is 
time, — not less so, not more so. If there is any trouble 
about conceiving of infinite time, that is the fault of 
time, not of this simple mechanical rhythm of planet 
swinging about sun. Whatever endless time means, that 
the rhythm of this conceived simple system is adequate 
to fill. Even so, too, in case of space. We have supposed 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


329 


our sun and planet to be alone in boundless space. Just 
wbat an actually boundless space is, it is hard to define. 
One soon comes to suspect, when one tries a definition, 
that one is dealing with a self-contradictory notion. But 
be that as it may, the conceived sun and planet, there to¬ 
gether in space, require space to exist in, but have by 
hypothesis no physical relations to infinite space, do not 
trouble themselves, as it were, about whether space is in¬ 
finite or no. If a really infinite space can exist, then the 
sun and planet can be in it; but for their physical rela¬ 
tions they require only the finite bit of space within their 
own masses and within the planet’s orbit. The existence 
of such a system, then, is to be called essentially bound¬ 
less in time just because its physical properties drive us to 
no assumptions about what boundless time is and means, 
but are processes that, as being rhythmical and self-com¬ 
pleted, arouse no question as to how or when they could 
have begun, and are therefore boundless in whatever sense 
time itself proves to be boundless. This same existence 
is again intelligible as a conceived fact in boundless space, 
because, whatever boundless space means, this process, as 
being a definite and limited one, could find its place in 
such a space. 

But now (and here is the important point), the world of 
the “ running-down ” energy, and of the endlessly consoli¬ 
dating matter, differs from this simple world of the sun 
and planet, in that its existence has, as conceived, an essen¬ 
tially physical relation to an actually infinite space and 
time, so that its processes cannot be conceived as bound¬ 
less in time, merely because they suggest to us, like the 
sun and planet, no possible beginning; but can only be 
conceived as boundless by first meeting and overcoming 
all the difficulties as to an actually infinite space and time. 
Infinite space and time as such become, in such a theory, 
matters, not of dim possibility, but rather parts of a phys¬ 
ical hypothesis. They render this physical hypothesis. 


330 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


therefore, peculiarly hard to conceive with congruity. 
This is no place for dwelling in full upon what these diffi¬ 
culties about infinite space and time really are. I am not 
here setting forth at length a philosophy, but only sug¬ 
gesting one. What I have to point out, however, may be 
indicated by returning to a former analogy. I have said 
that this world, where all the processes take the one direc¬ 
tion towards the consolidation of matter, is very unlike the 
simple and rhythmical world of the conceived sun and 
planet. What I now have to point out is that this our 
world of the endlessly consolidating matter, if taken as 
an absolutely real world, would much resemble in one 
feature that other conceived world where the elephant 
rested on the tortoise. The trouble with that world was 
that support was assumed to be needed, and yet none was 
ever defined. The trouble with this world is that the 
store of available energy at any moment, lacking both 
permanency in itself and any tendency to get, through 
rhythmic processes, a periodic restoration of its previous 
quantity, sends us backwards endlessly in time for a 
definition of the very physical process and constitution 
to which its present quantity shall have been due. Now 
some sort of endless regress in time is in one sense forced 
upon us by every physical process. The simple rhythm 
of the sun and planet also sent us back endlessly into 
time; not in order that we should find out what sort 
of process it was (for that we learned from any one cy¬ 
cle), but only in order that we should see how such a 
process as that could not be conceived to have a physical 
beginning. But this process of the endlessly consolidating 
world, as Clifford defines it, sends us back into time much 
as the earth, elephant and tortoise series would send us off 
into space. Would it be any answer to an objector to 
say, in case of the elephant and tortoise series: — Oh, the 
tortoise, too, is supported by another creature, say a giant; 
and he by a tree; that by something else; and so on ad 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


331 


infinitum ? No, for thus no support would to all infinity 
ever begin to be explained. Even so, although a perfectly 
rhythmical and complete physical process can easily, with¬ 
out incongruity, be regarded as unbounded when we look 
backwards, — a boundless regress where, on the other 
hand, all the character of the process changes as we go 
backwards, and changes, wholly without rhythm or any 
sort of reversal of type, in one general direction, does and 
must involve incongruity. 

What incongruity may now be finally and succinctly 
pointed out. Any moment of time, however remote, must 
actually have been passed through in order that our con¬ 
solidating world should have reached its present state. 
To any such past moment, would correspond some actual 
physical state of our supposed world. Far back in time 
its state would have been one of greater and greater dis¬ 
integration. Passing to the limit we can say that our 
hypothesis would suppose, (1) that at an infinite past 
time the particles of matter now together in the stars 
must have been infinitely distant from one another ; and 
(2) that, since every state, even the present one, presup¬ 
poses and demands all the previous states of this un¬ 
rhythmical process as physically necessary antecedents, 
the present state of the universe could not be unless that 
antecedent state of the mutually infinite remoteness of its 
parts actually did precede. 

The idea of infinite remoteness, as being an actual 
physical fact, is, however, notoriously hard to conceive. 
It is one thing to say that our space is such that, however 
far you go out into its depths, you could always go further. 
To mention that character of space is merely to state a 
fact of our space conception, — a fact that nobody has 
any trouble to conceive. It is quite another thing to try 
to conceive a state of the world in which there are actm 
ally two particles of matter that shall be an infinite num¬ 
ber of leagues apart. The conception of the boundless- 


332 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


ness of space is, in the first case, a mere expression of our 
actual failure to conceive of a boundary. This failure is 
a fact of immediate observation for our consciousness. 
But if I say, in the second case: There are, in a certain 
state of the world, two particles of matter, p and q , and 
the distance between these two particles is an infinite dis 
tance, I contradict myself. For the line pq which joins 
these particles must by hypothesis end in one direction at 
p and in the other direction at <7, — in other words must 
be finite. 

And yet our present hypothesis as to the real world 
demands of us the assertion that such a contradictory state 
of things must have been real in order that the present 
state of the world should have come to pass. 

Clifford himself, in stating the hypothesis, avoids our 
present incongruity by saying only that, in case of the 
endlessly consolidating world, the behavior of things is 
such that if we go back as far as ever we like, we shall 
find the particles of matter further and further apart. 
But unfortunately such a statement does not exhaust the 
difficulty in case this seeming process has always been an 
absolutely real one. Fixing our attention once more on 
two particles, p and we see that, by the hypothesis, at a 
time (4) they were a certain distance apart (c^), and that 
an earlier time (£ 2 ) they were yet further apart (say a dis¬ 
tance c? 2 ), and so on indefinitely. But now in order that 
they should reach the distance apart that we have called 
they must before have been actually at the distance from 
another that we have called d 2 . Passing to the limit, 
then, we have to say that in order to reach the less dis¬ 
tances they must universally have been^rstf at the greater 
distances, so that unless one presupposes the greater as 
real, and so at the limit, the infinite distance as actually 
precedent, the finite distances cannot have been reached. 
It is n’t merely the case, then, that we are dealing with 
an hypothesis of a process that, however far we choose to 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


333 


follow it, proves to be for our consciousness, and from our 
point of view, unlimited. The trouble is that unless we 
first conceive the unlimited distances as real, the limited 
distances can never be reached. Therefore, if the process 
is what it seems to be, namely, an absolutely real one, the 
unlimited distances must have been real. Our infinite in 
this case is n’t the indefinite beyond that we do not attain, 
however far back we go. It is the impossible that yet 
must have been actually and absolutely attained before 
any of the states of the world that we experience could 
have been reached. Only by passing through this im¬ 
possible infinite distance from one another, can the parti¬ 
cles p and q have reached the conceivable finite distances 
from one another. 

The parallel between this supposed real world and that 
of the elephant and tortoise is now fairly plain. The 
true supporter of the elephant-tortoise earth must, if he 
exists at all, be infinitely remote and yet real. Without 
him elephant and tortoise, by hypothesis, could not sup¬ 
port anything, being themselves unsupported. Even so, 
the true antecedent of our present physical world must, 
on Clifford’s hypothesis, be a state in which the space 
relations of the smallest particles of matter were relations 
of infinite remoteness from one another. Dropping out 
the consideration of the infinite time, we can then say in 
absolute terms that, on this hypothesis, there was for¬ 
merly a real state of the world in which its ultimate par¬ 
ticles were at infinite distances from one another. Is this 
not as if we said of the elephant and tortoise : There is , 
at an infinite distance, that which supports the whole 
series and them ? 

I repeat, upon the more technical aspect of the difficul¬ 
ties regarding infinite space and time, I have not here 
further to dwell. What we have found is simply this: — 

1. There are possible physical processes that you can 
conceive as universalized, as essentially boundless in time, 


334 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


as existent in boundless space, without any effort to define 
what the positive nature of a really infinite time and 
space are. Such processes are the ones known as “ cycli¬ 
cal.” In case of these processes, the definition of one 
cycle involves the description of all. A “ cyclical ” physi¬ 
cal process, conceived as isolated in space, could not 
change its character through any physical cause. How¬ 
ever long, therefore, you followed it forwards or back¬ 
wards, you would find only the same thing repeated. In 
this conception there is nothing difficult. Such a process 
you would call essentially endless; meaning thereby that 
whatever endless time really means, and whatever its ulti¬ 
mate nature turns out to be, the processes in question 
would be adequate to that endlessness. Of such processes 
our supposed sun and planet example is an illustration. 
There is no incongruity involved in universalizing such 
processes. 

2. But there are, on the other hand, possible physical 
processes that you cannot thus universalize, without pre¬ 
supposing infinite space and time as being themselves, in 
all their infinity, elements in the definition of certain 
states of the physical process in question. Of such phys¬ 
ical processes the world of the elephant and tortoise 
series, and the world of Clifford’s hypothesis, are possible 
examples, so soon as you suppose them to be not seeming 
but genuinely real worlds. Common sense will at once 
say that as we have no notion of infinite space and time 
as actual physical wholes, we can have no right thus to 
universalize such processes, in case we meet with special 
examples of them in our experience. Philosophy goes 
deeper, and declares that thus to universalize such physi¬ 
cal process involves us in incongruity, involves the presup¬ 
position of a real past state of the world whose very defi¬ 
nition is self-contradictory. 

The result, so far, is that the world of the endlessly con¬ 
solidating matter can’t be the ultimately real world, but 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


385 


must be only a seeming world whose anomalous character 
is clue to our private and human point of view. Seen as 
we see it, the empirical truth about matter and energy 
must be only the show of a deeper truth. This apparent 
law of the endless consolidation of the universe must be 
only a fragmentary aspect. These stars and “ intertwined 
spirals ” and “convoluted windings” of stars, these hypo¬ 
thetical molecules that have been forever falling nearer 
and nearer together, this process that has been forever 
taking one direction without reaching as yet its goal, — 
all these things must belong to the show of reality. The 
substance, the soul of it all, must lie behind. The real 
world process cannot thus be essentially a paradox, essen¬ 
tially incomplete, fundamentally absurd. It must have at 
least as much unity and self-consistency as a “ cyclical ” 
physical process. When we see it as we do, in this ragged 
and unintelligible shape, that must be because, in our ex¬ 
perience, we are but playing with the “pebbles on the 
beach.” The “ ocean of ultimate reality and truth ” must 
lie beyond. 

In all the foregoing I have not wished to create diffi¬ 
culties ; I have merely found them where they exist. Nor 
have I wished to make light of the world of our modern 
realism. On the contrary, as I repeat, those who study 
this world most devotedly are often the first to acknow¬ 
ledge not only its mystery, but its probable fragmentari¬ 
ness, its suggestion of a hidden truth beyond. “ Unknow¬ 
able,” some investigators call this real world on account 
of such paradoxes. It is, however, precisely the men who 
thus call reality unknowable, who seem to me to make 
light of the serious business of science. What one learns 
from such puzzles is not that our scientific experience is 
untrue, but that it is n’t the revealer of the whole truth, 
— not that matter and energy and their laws are illusions, 
but that they are partial revelations only of what, seen 
from a higher point of view, would have to get the unity 


336 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


and completeness that our human point of view so far 
lacks. These puzzles, then, do not turn us away from the 
world of science ; they rather encourage us to philoso¬ 
phize as to the meaning of the presuppositions that lie be¬ 
neath science. If you find a significant limitation in 
your knowledge, philosophy bids you scrutinize the bases 
of your knowledge to see what in the human point of view 
it is that is the source of this limitation. 

Clifford, whose way of stating the hypothesis of the law 
of endless consolidation we have been criticising, was him¬ 
self one of the first to insist, although for other reasons, 
upon the probable inadequacy of this hypothesis. Him¬ 
self one of the most admirable minds of recent British 
thought, he was restlessly at work, during his brief career, 
at the task of criticising the fundamental postulates of 
science. That the laws of physics and even of geometry 
are probably not ultimate truths about the nature of 
things, he used to argue with all the clearness of the ma¬ 
thematician and all the reflective skill of the born specu¬ 
lator. Our space and time, with their paradoxical infini¬ 
ties, he used to regard as very suspicious appearances. In 
criticising him I have therefore, after all, only borrowed 
certain of his own methods of thinking. He was his own 
keenest critic. He dwelt on the borderland of philosophy. 
It is a source of deep regret that he never lived to enter 
into that land with the powers which he had been training 
so skillfully. He would there have proved himself a 
great conqueror. 

IV. 

The considerations of the foregoing discussion must 
have been wearisome enough in their abstractness. I 
hasten to suggest their more concrete bearings. 

The problem of the outer order, as we conceive it in 
these modern days, is the problem of the true relation of 
nature and evolution. The question of the previous dis¬ 
cussion has been only a highly abstract formulation of 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


337 


this problem. The seeming world, as we find it in space 
and time, is one whose matter and energy are permanent 
in quantity, while their distribution is endlessly changing. 
The changes of distribution going on about us on this 
planet have been, for what we call a long time, favorable 
to evolution. These same changes will, however, so far as 
we can see, lead to the ultimate extinction of evolution on 
our planet. The question arises, Does the same relation 
between the nature of the physical world and the evolu¬ 
tion, the progress, of the significant features of its various 
parts, hold true universally? The heavens, too, in their 
wholeness, suggest to us, from one point of view, a vast 
process of cosmical evolution. Examined more carefully, 
however, their physical phenomena seem to show that this 
evolution is but a transient stage of the endless world- 
process. The further question arises hereupon: Can we 
form a conception of the world-process in its true and 
entire nature, and so make out how it is actually related 
to what we call evolution ? To this question we have 
found thus far only such an answer as suggests that the 
true world, whose mere show is embodied in these physi¬ 
cal events now before our eyes, is at all events very in¬ 
adequately represented by them. For the solution of our 
problem, if it is to find any, we must search deeper. 

In what direction we have to search, our argument it¬ 
self very readily suggests. It is plain that in what we 
said about the incongruity of such physical conceptions 
as involve the existence of an actually infinite space and 
time, and of actually infinite distances between bodies, we 
have touched close upon those considerations concerning 
the objectivity of space and time themselves which we 
have now learned to associate with the name of Kant. 
What if the foregoing paradoxes of the world of the 
“ running down ” energy, and of the endlessly consolidat¬ 
ing matter, were due to the fact that we have been try¬ 
ing to give an hypothetical account of an absolute world- 


338 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

process in terms of human forms of conception and of 
experience? What if the truly complete world-process 
does not occur in time at all, but can only be conceived 
“under the form of eternity,” as Spinoza would have 
said ? “ Such existence,” said Spinoza, speaking of eter¬ 

nal truths, “ cannot be explained by means of continuance 
or time.” What if both the permanent laws and energy 
of nature on the one hand, and what we know as the pro¬ 
cess of evolution on the other, were but the temporal sign 
of something whose significance is to be otherwise con¬ 
ceived ? Doubtful phrases these, one may say; yet, after 
all, what more doubtful than the ultimate truth of a 
physical world in which occur such paradoxical processes 
as we have been examining ? 

On the other hand, what more obvious than that if one 
conceives man as the product of a physical evolution of 
the type that we have heretofore been discussing, if one 
says that a planet-crust, at a particular stage of its his¬ 
tory, brought forth man, while the heat of a slowly dying 
sun sustained his life, as it had done the lives of his 
countless animal ancestors before him, — if one holds all 
this to be true, then one must indeed look with equal won¬ 
der upon the power of such a creature to conceive at all 
of the real universe, or of the eternal, and upon the 
naivete that trusts, without analysis and criticism, his no¬ 
tions of space and of time, his natural perceptions of the 
outer world, as if they were sure to be well-founded. The 
marvel of marvels, that this being, evolved from inorganic 
nature, from the stuff and the energy of a cooling solar 
system, — this mortal bit of mechanism — should after all 
know, should look forwards and backwards to eternity, 
and learn so much of the nature that gave him birth, — 
such a marvel surely calls for a deeper scrutiny. The 
world where such things appear is surely not what it 
seems; and the lesson is that, in the critical study of just 
this knowing power of ours, in the scrutiny of our most 


NATURE AND EVOLUTION. 


339 


fundamental ideas, is to be found, if anywhere, the key 
to these mysteries. We have been so far inquiring into 
this or that truth. Now, more than ever, we see the need 
of assailing the problem, What is truth itself? What are 
our powers to know ? And what validity have our ideas 
of the world and of its endless life ? 

And thus we are prepared, by the paradoxes of the 
outer order, to return for awhile, in order to seek a solu¬ 
tion of them, to the recesses of the inner life, there to 
examine our conceptions of the world once more with a 
truly philosophical reflectiveness. 

Does our result so far seem nothing but a sense of the 
mystery of things ? Then remember at least that, as all 
modern thought has been teaching us from the start, the 
outer world is n’t merely foreign to us. What we call the 
dark external universe yonder is, after all, our universe, 
even when we only go so far as to doubt or to wonder 
about it. Whatever the success or the failure of this or 
that idealistic theory, the permanent lesson of modern 
idealism has been that the inner and the outer worlds 
must have organic relations. If one of them is the world 
of the thinker, the other is the object of his thought. 
Ignorant as he may be of numberless facts in it, it has to 
echo somehow, even from its remotest heavens, the magic 
words that utter his deepest beliefs about it. Philosophy 
promises help, just because, when it speaks of the world 
whose mystery man’s mind longs to penetrate, it also 
speaks of the mind itself whose nature it is to acknow¬ 
ledge, yes, and in acknowledging, just so far to penetrate 
the mystery. For, as we shall hereafter see, I cannot 
recognize a rational problem even as a problem, unless I 
already know a good deal about the object whose nature 
gives me this problem. What I definitely recognize as 
unknown must have such a knowable nature as enables 
me to make sure that it is unknown. An object of my 
conscious and rational ignorance is still an object, deter- 


340 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


mined as such for me by my thought, and so in one aspect 
known to me, even in order that in some other aspect it 
may be unknown. Ignorance, if only it be definite igno¬ 
rance, is sure to be partial knowledge. In so far as our 
study has made us aware of the mysteries that are in the 
world, it has already taught us much about the world. 
We don’t know the precise value of the ratio of the cir¬ 
cumference of a circle to its diameter. That is a good 
example of a rational mystery. For it is a definite, a 
highly scientific mystery. But see, we don’t know this 
ratio just because we do know enough about the nature 
of a circle to be sure that this ratio is absolutely unstate- 
able in any finite form. Well, even so, if philosophy 
shows us in any definite way how mysterious the world 
is, that will only be because philosophy will tell us enough 
about the true nature of the world to make clear to us 
where the mystery lies. Vague mysteries are the amuse¬ 
ment of fools. Precise and rational mysteries are, in one 
sense, the goal of science. In defining our relation to 
nature, then, in making clear the issues of science, philo¬ 
sophy will aid us, not to solve all mysteries, as a dream 
might pretend to do, but to know where the deepest prob¬ 
lems of the world lie, and thereby to show us something 
of the very essence of the reality which we have a right 
to find obscure. 

It is in this spirit that I shall in the next lecture under¬ 
take to give you, in brief, my reasons for holding that an 
idealistic interpretation of the physical world, and in par¬ 
ticular the theory of one absolute Self as the truth em¬ 
bodied in both nature and mind, is a doctrine that, with¬ 
out any presumptuous effort to transcend our human 
powers, may be explained and established. 


LECTURE XI. 


REALITY AND IDEALISM : — THE INNER WORLD AND ITS 
MEANING. 

Such brief essays as I am to embody in these untech- 
nical discussions must needs fail somewhere. I shall be 
glad, at all events, if they do not fail in frank state¬ 
ment of opinion. I do not want to weary you with bare 
assurances ; I do not want to leave you with nothing to 
remember but my own word that in case I had time, I 
would expound my meaning and my reason for it; but I 
do want, above all things, in so far as I see any glimpse 
of truth, to risk in your presence a plain confession of it. 
If I must come short of the purpose of these lectures, let 
it be in technical exactness, since once for all that belongs 
elsewhere; but let me not fail of showing you that I 
have convictions, such as they are, whether I can make 
you agree with them or not. I do not know how you 
have found it, but for my part, as I have read the writ¬ 
ings of some of the modern authors whose intelligence 
and caution I most value, I am frequently tormented 
with their tenderness of conscience about risking a state¬ 
ment of their personal beliefs. They have been driven to 
take this attitude, no doubt, through the warning which 
is given them by the traditional dogmatism of certain the¬ 
ologians. Longing to escape from the over-assurance and 
intolerance of such, the writers to whom I now refer lay 
more stress upon liberality, caution, patience, and learn¬ 
ing, than even upon courage. I hope that I do not under¬ 
value liberality or caution, and I am sure that I long for 
vastly more learning and patience than I shall ever pos- 


342 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


sess; but, after all, it is what a man by chance believes, 
not what he does not believe, that enables him to be of 
service to his fellows as a thinker; and whatever frag¬ 
ment of knowledge one may possess will surely remain 
undiscovered unless he sometime ventures assertion of his 
temperament for whatever it may happen to be worth. 

The business of the present lecture is to tell you in 
what sense and for what reasons I am an idealist. In the 
next following lectures, returning to the study of the outer 
order, I shall try to explain how, in consequence, I ven¬ 
ture to conceive our human relationships to that physical 
world from which we have sprung and of which we are a 
part. In my concluding lecture I shall set forth what 
practical consequences I conceive to flow from my philo¬ 
sophy concerning that which constitutes the vocation of 
man. You will not require me to say that, as to all these 
three matters, I must needs be not only very fragmentary 
and unpersuasive, but also highly unoriginal. Other 
investigators may deal with novelties. It is the fate of 
the philosophical student to be cut off, by his very task, 
from all but a very relative and imperfect sort of original¬ 
ity. He is simply making articulate the life which he is 
privileged to enjoy. He invents nothing; he only con¬ 
fesses. Prophets create ideals ; he critically expounds 
them. Poets, whose relation to passion is more direct 
and momentary, and therefore less universal, less abstract, 
less critical, less systematic, have for this very reason far 
more of the inventive about them. The student of philo¬ 
sophy is privileged to survey, to contemplate life from 
without, to reword. Others create; he observes. Con¬ 
sequently, were a philosophy original, it would be ipso 
facto untrue. The doctrines of philosophy are borrowed 
from passion. If, for instance, idealism is true at all, 
that is because all of you are already idealists. The phi¬ 
losopher only tells you so. He does not make you so. 
The fashion of my exposition in the following lectures may 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


343 


have this or that of my own about it. The matter is as 
old as it is true ; or, if it is not old, then that is because 
it is not true. 

But in still another sense is this discussion unoriginal. 
The time is long past when really intelligent thinkers 
sought to do anything outside of intimate relations to the 
history of thought. It still happens, indeed, that even in 
our day some lonesome student will occasionally publish 
a philosophical book that he regards as entirely revolu¬ 
tionary, as digging far beneath all that thought has ever 
yet accomplished, and as beginning quite afresh the labors 
of human reflection. Such men, when they appear nowa¬ 
days, as once in a while they do appear, are anachro¬ 
nisms ; and you will always find them either ignorant of 
the history of the very subject that they propose to revo¬ 
lutionize or incapable of reading this history intelligently. 
What they give you is always an old doctrine, more or 
less disguised in a poorly novel terminology, and much 
worse thought out than it has already been thought out, 
time after time, in the history of speculation. It is one 
of the defects of the current liberalism in matters of opin¬ 
ion that it does encourage, only too often, this sort of 
thinking ; and the sole corrective of the error is a certain 
amount of philosophical study of an historical sort before 
one begins to print one’s speculations. 

Now, as you know, I have been fearing such unhistori- 
cal fashions of procedure so much that I have been devot¬ 
ing myself wholly, during the first part of these lectures, 
to telling a story, and adding occasional criticisms. It fol¬ 
lows that I have no doctrine to teach save the one that 
this history has taught me. Personal conviction, then, 
offered for whatever it is worth, — a reflective confession 
of my own temperament — but all this reflection guided 
throughout by the light which the history of thought gives 
me about what is really human and worth confessing 
in this temperament of mine, — such must be the bush 


344 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


ness of these concluding lectures. For how it is that a 
man can thus be at once merely the critic of his own 
deeper nature, and still merely the mouthpiece for the 
telling of the lesson that he has learned from the history 
of thought, you will now after all these discussions surely 
be able to see. The philosophical student confesses his 
own ideals; for what others has he to confess ? He 
learns, however, from history what amongst his ideals 
have any permanent human value; for the history of 
thought is the school in which alone one can learn to 
humanize one’s reflective processes, and to distinguish the 
accidental from the essential in one’s temperament. 


i. 

I am very sorry that I cannot state my idealism in a 
simple and unproblematic form; but the nature of the doc¬ 
trine forbids. I must first of all puzzle you with a para¬ 
dox, by saying that my idealism has nothing in it which 
contradicts the principal propositions of what is nowa¬ 
days called scientific Agnosticism, in so far, namely, as 
this agnosticism relates to that world of facts of experi¬ 
ence which man sees and feels and which science studies. 
Of such agnosticism we learned something in our last 
lecture. But I must go on to say that the fault of our 
modern so-called scientific agnosticism is only that it has 
failed to see how the world in space and time, the world 
of causes and effects, the world of matter and of finite 
mind, whereof we know so little and long to know so 
much, is a very subordinate part of reality. It will be 
my effort to explain how we do know something very 
deep and vital about what reality is in its innermost 
essence. My explanation will indeed be very poor and 
fragmentary, but the outcome of it will be the very highly 
paradoxical assertion that while the whole finite world is 
full of dark problems for us, there is absolutely nothing, 
not even the immediate facts of our sense at this moment, 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


345 


so clear, so certain, as the existence and the unity of that 
infinite conscious Self of whom we have now heard so 
much. About the finite world, as I shall assert, we know 
in general only what experience teaches us and science 
records. There is nothing in the universe absolutely sure 
except the Infinite. That will be the curious sort of 
agnosticism that I shall try in a measure to expound. 
Of the infinite we know that it is one and conscious. Of 
the finite things, that is, of the particular fashions of be¬ 
havior in terms of which the infinite Consciousness gives 
himself form and plays the world-game, we know only 
what we experience. Yet doubtless it will at once seem 
to you that in one important respect my announced doc¬ 
trine is in obvious conflict with a wise agnosticism. For 
is it not confessedly anthromorphic in its character ? 
And is not anthropomorphism precisely the defect that 
modern thinkers have especially taught us to avoid ? 

Anthropomorphism was the savage view, which led 
primitive man to interpret extraordinary natural events 
as expressions of the will of beings like himself. How¬ 
ever he came by his fancy, whether by first believing in 
the survival of the ghosts of his ancestors, and then con¬ 
ceiving them as the agents who produced lightning, and 
who moved the sun, or by a simple and irreducible instinct 
of his childish soul, leading him to see himself in nature, 
and to regard it all as animate ; in any case he made the 
bad induction, created the gods in his own image, and 
then constituted them as the causes of all natural events. 
His ignorant self-multiplication we must avoid. Shall 
our limited inner experience be the only test of what 
sorts of causation may exist in the world? What we 
know is that events happen to us, and happen in a certain 
fixed order. We do not know the ultimate causes of these 
events. If we lived on some other planet, doubtless 
causes of a very novel sort would become manifest to us, 
and our whole view of nature would change. It is self- 


346 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY - . 


contradictory, it is absurd, to make our knowledge the 
measure of all that is! The real world that causes our 
experience is a great x , wholly unknown to us except in 
a few select phenomena, which happen to fall within our 
ken. How wild to guess about the mysteries of the infi¬ 
nite ! 

But now this agnosticism, too, as I assure you, I ar¬ 
dently and frankly agree with, so far as it concerns itself 
with precisely that world in which it pretends to move, 
and to which it undertakes to apply itself. I have no 
desire to refute it. Touching all the world in space and 
time beyond experience, in the scientific sense of the term 
experience, I repeat that I know nothing positive. I 
know, for instance, nothing about the stratification of 
Saturn, or the height of the mountains on the other side 
of the moon. For the same reason, also, I know nothing 
of any anthropomorphic daemons or gods here or there in 
nature, acting as causes of noteworthy events. Of these I 
know nothing, because science has at present no need for 
such hypotheses. There may be such beings ; there doubt¬ 
less are in nature many curious phenomena; but what 
curiosities further experience might show us, we must 
wait for experience to point out ere we shall know. I re¬ 
peat, in its own world, agnosticism is in all these respects 
in the right. For reasons that you will later see, I object 
indeed to the unhappy word unknowable. In the world 
of experience, as in the world of abstracter problems, 
there are infinitely numerous things unknown to us. But 
there is no rational question that could not somehow be 
answered by a sufficiently wise person. There are things 
relatively unknowable for us, not things absolutely so. 
There are numberless experiences that I shall never have, 
in my individual capacity; and there are numberless 
problems that I shall never solve. But the only absolute 
insoluble mysteri.es, as I shall hereafter point out to you, 
would be the questions that it is essentially absurd to ask. 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


347 


Still, not to quarrel over words, what many agnostics 
mean by unknowable is simply the stubbornly unknown, 
and, in that sense, I fully agree and indeed insist that 
human knowledge is an island in the vast ocean of mys¬ 
tery, and that numberless questions, which it deeply con¬ 
cerns humanity to answer, will never be answered so long 
as we are in our present limited state, bound to one planet, 
and left for our experience to our senses, our emotions, 
and our moral activities. 

But, if I thus accept this agnostic view of the world of 
experience, what chance is left, you will say, for anything 
like an absolute system of philosophy? In what sense 
can I pretend to talk of idealism, as giving any final view 
of the whole nature of things? In what sense, above all, 
can I pretend to be a theist, and to speak of the absolute 
Self as the very essence and life of the whole world? For 
is this not mere anthropomorphism ? Is n’t it ftiaking 
our private human experience the measure of all reality ? 
Is n’t it making hypotheses in terms of our experience, 
about things beyond our experience ? Is n’t it making 
our petty notions of causation a basis for judging of the 
nature of the unknown first cause ? Is n’t it another case 
of what the savage did when he saw his gods in the thun¬ 
der-clouds, because he conceived that causes just like his 
own angry moods must be here at work ? Surely, at best, 
this is sentiment, faith, mystical dreaming. It can’t be 
philosophy. 

I answer, just to change our whole view of the deeper 
reality of things, just to turn away our attention from any 
illusive search for first causes in the world of experience, 
just to get rid of fanciful faith about the gods in outer 
nature, and just to complete the spiritual task of agnosti¬ 
cism by sending us elsewhere than to phenomena for the 
true and inner nature of things, — for just this end was 
the whole agony of modern philosophy endured by those 
who have wrestled with its problems. Is any one agnos- 


348 


THE SPIKIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


tic about the finite world ? Then I more. I know no¬ 
thing of any first cause in the world of appearances yon¬ 
der. I see no gods in the thunder clouds, no Keplerian 
angels carrying the planets in conic sections around the 
sun; I imagine no world-maker far back in the ages, 
beginning the course of evolution. Following Laplace, I 
need, once more, no such hypothesis. I await the ver¬ 
dict of science about all facts and events in physical 
nature. And yet that is just why I am an idealist. It 
is my agnosticism about the causes of my experience that 
makes me search elsewhere than amongst causes for the 
meaning of experience. The outer world which the 
agnostic sees and despairs of knowing is not the region 
where I look for light. The living God, whom idealism 
knows, is not the first cause in any physical sense, at all. 
No possible experience could find him as a thing amongst 
things or show any outer facts that would prove his exist¬ 
ence. He is n’t anywhere in space or in time. He makes 
from without no worlds. He is no hypothesis of empiri¬ 
cal science. But he is all the more real for that, and his 
existence is all the surer. For causes are, after all, very 
petty and subordinate truths in the world, and facts, 
phenomena, as such, could never demonstrate any impor¬ 
tant spiritual truth. The absolute Self simply does n’t 
cause the world. The very idea of causation belongs 
to things of finite experience, and is only a mythological 
term when applied to the real truth of things. Not be¬ 
cause I interpret the causes of my experience in terms of 
my limited ideas of causation is the universe of God a 
live thing to me, but for a far deeper reason; for a rea¬ 
son which deprives this world of agnosticism of all sub¬ 
stantiality and converts it once for all into mere show. I 
am ignorant of this world just because it is a show-world. 

And this deeper reason of the idealist I may as well 
first suggest in a form which may perhaps seem just now 
even more mysterious than the problem which I solve by 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


349 


means of it. My reason for believing that there is one ab¬ 
solute World-Self, who embraces and is all reality, whose 
consciousness includes and infinitely transcends our own, 
in whose unity all the laws of nature and all the mysteries 
of experience must have their solution and their very 
being, — is simply that the profoundest agnosticism which 
you can possibly state in any coherent fashion, the deepest 
doubt which you can any way formulate about the world or 
the things that are therein, already presupposes, implies, 
demands, asserts, the existence of such a World-Self. 
The agnostic, I say, already asserts this existence — 
unconsciously, of course, as a rule, but none the less inev¬ 
itably. For, as we shall find, there is no escape from the 
infinite Self except by self-contradiction. Ignorant as I 
am about first causes, I am at least clear, therefore, about 
the Self. If you deny him, you already in denying affirm 
him. You reckon ill when you leave him out. Him when 
you fly, he is the wings. He is the doubter and the 
doubt. You in vain flee from his presence. The wings 
of the morning will not aid you. Nor do I mean all this 
now as any longer a sort of mysticism. This truth is, I 
assure you, simply a product of dry logic. When I try 
to tell you about it in detail, I shall weary you by my 
wholly unmystical analysis of commonplaces. Here is, 
in fact, as we shall soon find, the very presupposition of 
presuppositions. You cannot stir, nay, you cannot even 
stand still in thought without it. Nor is it an unfamiliar 
idea. On the contrary, philosophy finds trouble in bring¬ 
ing it to your consciousness merely because it is so famil¬ 
iar. When they told us in childhood that we could not 
see God just because he was everywhere, just because his 
omnipresence gave us no chance to discern him and to fix 
our eyes upon him, they told us a deep truth in allegori¬ 
cal fashion. The infinite Self, as we shall learn, is actu¬ 
ally asserted by you in every proposition you utter, is 
there at the heart, so to speak, of the very multiplication 


850 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


table. The Self is so little a thing merely guessed at as 
the unknowable source of experience, that already, in the 
very least of daily experiences you unconsciously know 
him as something present. This, as we shall find, is the 
deepest tragedy of our finitude, that continually he comes 
to his own, and his own receive him not, that he becomes 
flesh in every least incident of our lives; whilst we, gazing 
with wonder upon his world, search here and there for 
first causes, look for miracles, and beg him to show us the 
Father, since that alone will suffice us. No wonder that 
thus we have to remain agnostics. “ Hast thou been so 
long time with me, and yet hast thou not known me ? ” 
Such is the eternal answer of the Logos to every doubting 
question. Seek him not as an outer hypothesis to explain 
experience. Seek him not anywhere yonder in the clouds. 
He is no “ thing in itself.” But for all that, experience 
contains him. He is the reality, the soul of it. “ Did not 
our heart burn within us while he talked with us by the 
way ?” And, as we shall see, he does not talk merely to 
our hearts. He reveals himself to our coolest scrutiny. 


ii. 

But enough of speculative boasting. Coming to closer 
quarters with my topic, I must remind you that idealism 
has two aspects. It is, for the first, a kind of analysis of 
the world, an analysis which so far has no absolute char¬ 
acter about it, but which undertakes, in a fashion that 
might be acceptable to any skeptic, to examine what you 
mean by all the things, whatever they are, that you be¬ 
lieve in or experience. This idealistic analysis consists 
merely in a pointing out, by various devices, that the 
world of your knowledge, whatever it contains, is through 
and through such stuff as ideas are made of, that you 
never in your life believed in anything definable but ideas, 
that, as Berkeley put it, “ this whole choir of heaven and 
furniture of earth ” is nothing for any of us but a system 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


351 


of ideas which govern our belief and our conduct. Such 
idealism has numerous statements, interpretations, embod¬ 
iments : forms part of the most various systems and expe¬ 
riences, is consistent with Berkeley’s theism, with Fichte’s 
ethical absolutism, with Professor Huxley’s agnostic em¬ 
piricism, with Clifford’s mind-stuff theory, with countless 
other theories that have used such idealism as a part of 
their scheme. In this aspect idealism is already a little 
puzzling to our natural consciousness, but it becomes 
quickly familiar, in fact almost commonplace, and seems 
after all to alter our practical faith or to solve our deeper 
problems very little. 

The other aspect of idealism is the one which gives us 
our notion of the absolute Self. To it the first is only 
preparatory. This second aspect is the one which from 
Kant, until the present time, has formed the deeper prob¬ 
lem of thought. Whenever the world has become more 
conscious of its significance, the work of human philoso¬ 
phy will be, not nearly ended (Heaven forbid an end!), 
but for the first time fairly begun. For then, in criti¬ 
cally estimating our passions, we shall have some truer 
sense of whose passions they are. 

I begin with the first and the less significant aspect of 
idealism. Our world, I say, whatever it may contain, is 
such stuff as ideas are made of. This preparatory sort 
of idealism is the one that, as I just suggested, Berkeley 
made prominent, and, after a fashion familiar. I must 
state it in my own way, although one in vain seeks to 
attain novelty in illustrating so frequently described a 
view. 

Here, then, is our so real world of the senses, full of 
light and warmth and sound. If anything could be solid 
and external, surely, one at first will say, it is this world. 
Hard facts, not mere ideas, meet us on every hand. Ideas 
any one can mould as he wishes. Not so facts. In idea 
socialists can dream out Utopias, disappointed lovers can 


352 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


imagine themselves successful, beggars can ride horses, 
wanderers can enjoy the fireside at home. In the realm 
of facts, society organizes itself as it must, rejected lovers 
stand for the time defeated, beggars are alone with their 
wishes, oceans roll drearily between home and the wan¬ 
derer. Yet this world of fact is, after all, not entirely 
stubborn, not merely hard. The strenuous will can mould 
facts. We can form our world, in part, according to our 
ideas. Statesmen influence the social order, lovers woo 
afresh, wanderers find the way home. But thus to alter 
the world we must work, and just because the laborer is 
worthy of his hire, it is well that the real world should 
thus have such fixity of things as enables us to anticipate 
what facts will prove lasting, and to see of the travail of 
our souls when it is once done. This, then, is the pre¬ 
supposition of life, that we work in a real world, where 
house-walls do not melt' away as in dreams, but stand 
firm against the winds of many winters, and can be felt 
as real. We do not wish to find facts wholly plastic ; we 
want them to be stubborn, if only the stubbornness be not 
altogether unmerciful. Our will makes constantly a sort 
of agreement with the world, whereby, if the world will 
continually show some respect to the will, the will shall 
consent to be strenuous in its industry. Interfere with 
the reality of my world, and you therefore take the very 
life and heart out of my will. 

The reality of the world, however, when thus defined 
in terms of its stubbornness, its firmness as against the 
will that has not conformed to its laws, its kindly rigidity 
in preserving for us the fruits of our labors, — such real¬ 
ity, I say, is still something wholly unanalyzed. In what 
does this stubbornness consist? Surely, many different 
sorts of reality, as it would seem, may be stubborn. 
Matter is stubborn when it stands in hard walls against 
us, or rises in vast mountain ranges before the path-find¬ 
ing explorer. But minds can be stubborn also. The 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


353 


lonely wanderer, who watches by the seashore the waves 
that roll between him and his home, talks of cruel facts, 
material barriers that, just because they are material, and 
not ideal, shall be the irresistible foes of his longing 
heart. “ In wish,” he says, “ I am with my dear ones, 
but alas, wishes cannot cross oceans! Oceans are mate¬ 
rial facts, in the cold outer world. Would that the world 
of the heart were all! ” But alas ! to the rejected lover 
the world of the heart is all, and that is just his woe. 
Were the barrier between him and his beloved only made 
of those stubborn material facts, only of walls or of 
oceans, how lightly might his will erelong transcend them 
all! Matter stubborn ! Outer nature cruelly the foe of 
ideas ! Nay, it is just an idea that now opposes him, — 
just an idea, and that, too, in the mind of the maiden he 
loves. But in vain does he calls this stubborn bit of dis¬ 
dain a merely ideal fact. No flint was ever more definite 
in preserving its identity and its edge than this disdain 
may be. Place me for a moment, then, in an external world 
that shall consist wholly of ideas, — the ideas, namely, 
of other people about me, a world of maidens who shall 
scorn me, of old friends who shall have learned to hate 
me, of angels who shall condemn me, of God who shall 
judge me. In what piercing north winds, amidst what 
fields of ice, in the labyrinths of what tangled forests, in 
the depths of what thick-walled dungeons, on the edges 
of what tremendous precipices, should I be more gen¬ 
uinely in the presence of stubborn and unyielding facts 
than in that conceived world of ideas! So, as one sees, 
I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, 
if I merely call it a world of ideas. On the contrary, as 
every teacher knows, the ideas of the people are often the 
most difficult of facts to influence. We were wrong, then, 
when we said that whilst matter was stubborn, ideas could 
be moulded at pleasure. Ideas are often the most impla¬ 
cable of facts. Even my own ideas, the facts of my own 


354 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


inner life, may cruelly decline to be plastic to my wish. 
The wicked will that refuses to be destroyed, — what rock 
has often more consistency for our senses than this will 
has for our inner consciousness! The king, in his soli¬ 
loquy in “ Hamlet,” — in what an unyielding world of 
hard facts does he not move! and yet they are now only 
inner facts. The fault is past; he is alone with his con¬ 
science. 

“ What rests ? 

Try what repentance can. What can it not ? 

Yet what can it, when one cannot repent ? 

O wretched state ! O bosom black as death ! 

O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, 

Art more engaged ! ” 

No, here are barriers worse than any material chains. 
The world of ideas has its own horrible dungeons and 
chasms. Let those who have refuted Bishop Berkeley’s 
idealism by the wonder why he did not walk over every 
precipice or into every fire if these things existed only in 
his idea, let such, I say, first try some of the fires and the 
precipices of the inner life, ere they decide that dangers 
cease to be dangers as soon as they are called ideal, or 
even subjectively ideal in me. 

Many sorts of reality, then, may be existent at the 
heart of any world of facts. But this bright and beauti¬ 
ful sense-world of ours, — what, amongst these many possi¬ 
ble sorts of reality, does that embody ? Are the stars and 
the oceans, the walls and the pictures, real as the maiden’s 
heart is real, — embodying the ideas of somebody, but 
none the less stubbornly real for that ? Or can we make 
something else of their reality? For, of course, that the 
stars and the oceans, the walls and the pictures have some 
sort of stubborn reality, just as tbe minds of our fellows 
have, our analysis so far does not for an instant think of 
denying. Our present question is, what sort of reality ? 
Consider, then, in detail, certain aspects of the reality 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


355 


that seems to be exemplified in our sense-world. The 
sublimity of the sky, the life and majesty of the ocean, 
the interest of a picture, — to what sort of real facts do 
these belong ? Evidently here we shall have no question. 
So far as the sense-world is beautiful, is majestic, is sub¬ 
lime, this beauty and dignity exist only for the appreciative 
observer. If they exist beyond him, they exist only for 
some other mind, or as the thought and embodied purpose 
of some universal soul of nature. A man who sees the 
same world, but who has no eye for the fairness of it, will 
find all the visible facts, but will catch nothing of their 
value. At once, then, the sublimity and beauty of the 
world are thus truths that one who pretends to insight 
ought to see, and they are truths which have no meaning 
except for such a beholder’s mind, or except as embody¬ 
ing the thought of the mind of the world. So here, at 
least, is so much of the outer world that is ideal, just as 
the coin or the jewel or the bank-note or the bond has its 
value not alone in its physical presence, but in the idea 
that it symbolizes to a beholder’s mind, or to the relatively 
universal thought of the commercial world. But let us 
look a little deeper. Surely, if the objects yonder are 
unideal and outer, odors and tastes and temperatures do 
not exist in these objects in just the way in which they 
exist in us. Part of the being of these properties, at 
least, if not all of it, is ideal and exists for us, or at best 
is once more the embodiment of the thought or purpose 
of some world-mind. About tastes you cannot dispute, 
because they are not only ideal but personal. For the 
benumbed tongue and palate of diseased bodily condi¬ 
tions, all things are tasteless. As for temperatures, a well 
known experiment will show how the same water may 
seem cold to one hand and warm to the other. But even 
so, colors and sounds are at least in part ideal. Their 
causes may have some other sort of reality; but colors 
themselves are not in the things, since they change with 


356 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the light that falls on the things, vanish in the dark 
(whilst the things remained unchanged), and differ for 
different eyes. And as for sounds, both the pitch and the 
quality of tones depend for us upon certain interesting 
peculiarities of our hearing organs, and exist in nature 
only as voiceless sound-waves trembling through the air. 
All such sense qualities, then, are ideal. The world yon¬ 
der may — yes, must — have attributes that give reasons 
why these qualities are thus felt by us; for so we assume. 
The world yonder may even be a mind that thus expresses 
its will to us. But these qualities need not, nay, cannot 
resemble the ideas that are produced in us, unless, indeed, 
that is because these qualities have place as ideas in some 
world-mind. Sound-waves in the air are not like our 
musical sensations; nor is the symphony as we hear it 
and feel it any physical property of the strings and the 
wind instruments; nor are the ether-vibrations that the 
sun sends 11s like our ideas when we see the sun; nor yet 
is the flashing of moonlight on the water as we watch 
the waves a direct expression of the actual truths of fluid 
motion as the water embodies them. 

Unless, then, the real physical world yonder is itself 
the embodiment of some world - spirit’s ideas, which he 
conveys to us, unless it is real only as the maiden’s heart 
is real, namely, as itself a conscious thought, then we have 
so far but one result: that real world (to repeat one of 
the commonplaces of modern popular science) is in itself, 
apart from somebody’s eyes and tongue and ears and 
touch, neither colored nor tasteful, neither cool nor warm, 
neither light nor dark, neither musical nor silent. All 
these qualities belong to our ideas, being indeed none the 
less genuine facts for that, but being in so far ideal facts. 
We must see colors when we look, we must hear music 
when there is playing in our presence; but this must is a 
must that consists in a certain irresistible presence of an 
idea in us under certain conditions. That this idea must 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 357 

come is, indeed, a truth as unalterable, once more, as the 
king’s settled remorse in Hamlet. But like this remorse, 
again, it exists as an ideal truth, objective, but through 
and through objective for somebody, and not apart from 
anybody. What this truth implies we have yet to see. 
So far it is only an ideal truth for the beholder, with just 
the bare possibility that behind it all there is the thought 
of a world-spirit. And, in fact, so for we must all go to¬ 
gether if we reflect. 

But now, at this point, the Berkeleyan idealist goes one 
step further. The real outside world that is still left un¬ 
explained and unanalyzed after its beauty, its warmth, its 
odors, its tastes, its colors, and its tones, have been rele¬ 
gated to the realm of ideal truths, what do you now mean 
by calling it real ? No doubt it is known as somehow real, 
but what is this reality Jcnown as being ? If you know 
that this world is still there and outer, as by hypothesis 
you know, you are bound to say what this outer character 
implies for your thought. And here you have trouble. 
Is the outer world, as it exists outside of your ideas, or of 
anybody’s ideas, something having shape, filling space, 
possessing solidity, full of moving things ? That would 
in the first place seem evident. The sound is n’t outside 
of me, but the sound-waves, you say, are. The colors are 
ideal facts ; but the ether-waves don’t need a mind to 
know them. Warmth is ideal, but the physical fact called 
heat, this playing to and fro of molecules, is real, and is 
there apart from any mind. But once more, is this so 
evident? What do I mean by the shape of anything, or 
by the size of anything ? Don’t I mean just the idea of 
shape or of size that I am obliged to get under certain 
circumstances ? What is the meaning of any property 
that I give to the real outer world ? How can I express 
that property except in case I think it in terms of my 
ideas ? As for the sound-waves and the ether-waves, what 
are they but things ideally conceived to explain the facts 


358 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

of nature ? The conceptions have doubtless their truth, 
but it is an ideal truth. What I mean by saying that the 
things yonder have shape and size and trembling mole¬ 
cules, and that there is air with sound-waves, and ether 
with light-waves in it, — what I mean by all this is that 
experience forces upon me, directly or indirectly, a vast 
system of ideas, which may indeed be founded in truth 
beyond me, which in fact must be founded in such truth 
if my experience has any sense, but which, like my ideas 
of color and of warmth, are simply expressions of how the 
world’s order must appear to me, and to anybody consti¬ 
tuted like me. Above all, is this plain about space. The 
real things, I say, outside of me, fill space, and move about 
in it. But what do I mean by space ? Only a vast sys¬ 
tem of ideas which experience and my own mind force 
upon me. Doubtless these ideas have a validity. They 
have this validity, that I, at all events, when I look upon 
the world, am bound to see it in space, as much bound as 
the king in Hamlet was, when he looked within, to see 
himself as guilty and unrepentant. But just as his guilt 
was an idea, — a crushing, an irresistible, an overwhelm¬ 
ing idea, — but still just an idea, so, too, the space in which 
I place my world is one great formal idea of mine. That 
is just why I can describe it to other people. “It has 
three dimensions,” I say, “ length, breadth, depth.” I 
describe each. I form, I convey, I construct, an idea of 
it through them. I know space, as an idea, very well. 
I can compute all sorts of unseen truths about the rela¬ 
tions of its parts. I am sure that you, too, share this 
idea. But, then, for all of us alike it is just an idea ; and 
when we put our world into space, and call it real there, 
we simply think one idea into another idea, not volun¬ 
tarily, to be sure, but inevitably, and yet without leaving 
the realm of ideas. 

Thus, all the reality that we attribute to our world, in 
so far as we know and can tell what we mean thereby, 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


359 


becomes ideal. There is, in fact, a certain system of ideas, 
forced upon us by experience, which we have to use as 
the guide of our conduct. This system of ideas we can’t 
change by our wish; it is for us as overwhelming a fact 
as guilt, or as the bearing of our fellows towards us, but 
we know it only as such a system of ideas. And we call 
it the world of matter. John Stuart Mill very well ex¬ 
pressed the puzzle of the whole thing, as we have now 
reached the statement of this puzzle, when he called mat¬ 
ter a mass of “ permanent possibilities of experience ” for 
each of us. Mill’s definition has its faults, but it is a 
very fair beginning. You know matter as something that 
either now gives you this idea or experience, or that would 
give you some other idea or experience under other cir¬ 
cumstances. A fire, while it burns, is for you a perma¬ 
nent possibility of either getting the idea of an agreeable 
warmth, or of getting the idea of a bad burn, and you 
treat it accordingly. A precipice amongst mountains is 
a permanent possibility of your experiencing a fall, or of 
your getting a feeling of the exciting or of the sublime in 
mountain scenery. You have no experience just now of 
the tropics or of the poles, but both tropical and polar 
climates exist in your world as permanent possibilities of 
experience. When you call the sun 92,000,000 miles 
away, you mean that between you and the sun (that is, 
between your present experience and the possible experi¬ 
ence of the sun’s surface) there would inevitably lie the 
actually inaccessible, but still numerically conceivable 
series of experiences of distance expressed by the number 
of miles in question. In short, your whole attitude to¬ 
wards the real world may be summed up by saying: “ I 
have experiences now which I seem bound to have, expe¬ 
riences of color, sound, and all the rest of my present 
ideas; and I am also bound by experience to believe that 
in case I did certain things (for instance, touched the 
wall, traveled to the tropics, visited Europe, studied 


360 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


physics), I then should get, in a determinate order, de¬ 
pendent wholly upon what I had done, certain other expe¬ 
riences (for instance, experiences of the wall’s solidity, or 
of a tropical climate, or of the scenes of an European tour, 
or of the facts of physics).” And this acceptance of 
actual experience, this belief in possible experience, con¬ 
stitutes all that you mean by your faith in the outer 
world. 

But, you say, Is not, then, all this faith of ours after all 
well founded ? Is n’t there really something yonder that 
corresponds in fact to this series of experiences in us ? 
Yes, indeed, there no doubt is. But what if this, which 
so shall correspond without us to the ideas within us, what 
if this hard and fast reality should itself be a system of 
ideas, outside of our minds but not outside of every mind? 
As the maiden’s disdain is outside the rejected lover’s 
mind, unchangeable so far for him, but not on that ac¬ 
count the less ideal, not the less a fact in a mind, as, to 
take afresh a former fashion of illustration, the price of a 
security or the objective existence of this lecture is an 
ideal fact, but real and external for the individual person, 
— even so why might not this world beyond us, this “per¬ 
manent possibility of experience,” be in essence itself a 
system of ideal experiences of some standard thought of 
which ours is only the copy ? Nay, must it not be such a 
system in case it has any reality at all ? For, after all, 
is n’t this precisely what our analysis brings us to ? No¬ 
thing whatever can I say about my world yonder that I 
do not express in terms of mind. What things are, ex¬ 
tended, moving, colored, tuneful, majestic, beautiful, holy, 
what they are in any aspect of their nature, mathematical, 
logical, physical, sensuously pleasing, spiritually valuable, 
all this must mean for me only something that I have to 
express in the fashion of ideas. The more I am to know 
my world, the more of a mind I must have for the pur¬ 
pose. The closer I come to the truth about the things, 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


361 


the more ideas I get. Is n’t it plain, then, that if my 
world yonder is anything knowable at all, it must be in 
and for itself essentially a mental world ? Are my ideas 
to resemble in any way the world ? Is the truth of my 
thought to consist in its agreement with reality? And 
am I thus capable, as common sense supposes, of conform¬ 
ing my ideas to things ? Then reflect. What can, after 
all, so well agree with an idea as another idea ? To what 
can things that go on in my mind conform unless it be to 
another mind ? If the more my mind grows in mental 
clearness, the nearer it gets to the nature of reality, then 
surely the reality that my mind thus resembles must be in 
itself mental. 

After all, then, would it deprive the world here about 
me of reality, nay, would it not rather save and assure 
the reality and the knowableness of my world of experi¬ 
ence, if I said that this world, as it exists outside of my 
mind, and of any other human minds, exists in and for a 
standard, an universal mind, whose system of ideas sim¬ 
ply constitutes the world? Even if I fail to prove that 
there is such a mind, do I not at least thus make plausi¬ 
ble that, as I said, our world of common sense has no fact 
in it which we cannot interpret in terms of ideas, so that 
this world is throughout such stuff as ideas are made of ? 
To say this, as you see, in no wise deprives our world of 
its due share of reality. If the standard mind knows 
now that its ideal fire has the quality of burning those 
who touch it, and if I in my finitude am bound to con¬ 
form in my experiences to the thoughts of this standard 
mind, then in case I touch that fire I shall surely get the 
idea of a burn. The standard mind will be at least as 
hard and fast and real in its ideal consistency as is the 
maiden in her disdain for the rejected lover; and I, in 
presence of the ideal stars and the oceans, will see the gen¬ 
uine realities of fate as certainly as the lover hears his 
fate in the voice that expresses her will. 


362 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


I need not now proceed further with an analysis that 
will be more or less familiar to many of you, especially 
after our foregoing historical lectures. What I have de¬ 
sired thus far is merely to give each of you, as it were, 
the sensation of being an idealist in this first and purely 
analytical sense of the word idealism. The sum and sub¬ 
stance of it all is, you see, this: you know your world in 
fact as a system of ideas about things, such that from 
moment to moment you find this system forced upon you 
by experience. Even matter you know just as a mass of 
coherent ideas that you cannot help having. Space and 
time, as you think them, are surely ideas of yours. Now, 
what more natural than to say that if this be so, the real 
world beyond you must in itself be a system of some¬ 
body’s ideas ? If it is, then you can comprehend what its 
existence means. If it is n’t, then since all you can know 
of it is ideal, the real world must be utterly unknowable, 
a bare x. Minds I can understand, because I myself am 
a mind. An existence that has no mental attribute is 
wholly opaque to me. So far, however, from such a world 
of ideas, existent beyond me in another mind, seeming to 
coherent thought essentially w?ireal, ideas and minds and 
their ways, are, on the contrary, the hardest and stubborn- 
est facts that we can name, ijf the external world is in it¬ 
self mental, then, be this reality a standard and universal 
thought, or a mass of little atomic minds constituting the 
various particles of matter, in any case one can compre¬ 
hend what it is, and will have at the same time to submit 
to its stubborn authority as the lover accepts the real¬ 
ity of the maiden’s moods. If the world is n’t such an 
ideal thing, then indeed all our science, which is through 
and through concerned with our mental interpretations of 
things, can neither have objective validity, nor make satis¬ 
factory progress towards truth. For as science is con¬ 
cerned with ideas, the world beyond all ideas is a bare x. 



REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


363 


III. 

But with this bare as, you will say, this analytical ideal¬ 
ism after all leaves me, as with something that, spite of all 
my analyses and interpretations, may after all be there 
beyond me as the real world, which my ideas are vainly 
striving to reach, but which eternally flees before me. So 
far, you will say, what idealism teaches is that the real 
world can only be interpreted by treating it as if it were 
somebody’s thought. So regarded, the idealism of Berke¬ 
ley and of other such thinkers is very suggestive; yet it 
does n’t tell us what the true world is, but only that so 
much of the true world as we ever get into our compre¬ 
hension has to be conceived in ideal terms. Perhaps, 
however, whilst neither beauty, nor majesty, nor odor, nor 
warmth, nor tone, nor color, nor form, nor motion, nor 
space, nor time (all these being but ideas of ours), can be 
said to belong to the extra-mental world, — perhaps, after 
all, there does exist there yonder an extra-mental world, 
which has nothing to do, except by accident, with any 
mind, and which is through and through just extra-mental, 
something unknowable, inscrutable, the basis of experi¬ 
ence, the source of ideas, but itself never experienced as 
it is in itself, never adequately represented by any idea, 
in us. Perhaps it is there. Yes, you will say, must it 
not be there ? Must not one accept our limitations once 
for all, and say, “ What reality is, we can never hope to 
make clear to ourselves. That which has been made clear 
becomes an idea in us. But always there is the beyond, 
the mystery, the inscrutable, the real, the x. To be sure, 
perhaps we can’t even know so much as that this x after 
all does exist. But then we feel bound to regard it as 
existent; or even if we doubt or deny it, may it not be 
there all the same ? ” In such doubt and darkness, then, 
this first form of idealism closes. If that were all there 
were to say, I should indeed have led you a long road in 


364 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

vain. Analyzing what the known world is for you, in 
case there is haply any world known to you at all, — this 
surely is n’t proving that there is any real world, or that 
the real world can be known. Are we not just where we 
started ? 

No; there lies now just ahead of us the goal of a syn¬ 
thetic idealistic conception, which will not be content with 
this mere analysis of the colors and forms of things, and 
with the mere discovery that all these are for us nothing 
but ideas. In this second aspect, idealism grows bolder, 
and fears not the profoundest doubt that may have entered 
your mind as to whether there is any world at all, or as 
to whether it is in any fashion knowable. State in full 
the deepest problem, the hardest question about the world 
that your thought ever conceived. In this new form ideal¬ 
ism offers you a suggestion that indeed will not wholly 
answer nor do away with every such problem, but that 
certainly will set the meaning of it in a new light. What 
this new light is, I must in conclusion seek to illustrate. 

Note the point we have reached. Either , as you see, 
your real world yonder is through and through a world of 
ideas, an outer mind that you are more or less compre¬ 
hending through your experience, or else, in so far as it 
is real and outer it is unknowable, an inscrutable x , an 
absolute mystery. The dilemma is perfect. There is no 
third alternative. Either a mind yonder, or else the un¬ 
knowable ; that is your choice. Philosophy loves such 
dilemmas, wherein all the mightiest interests of the spirit, 
all the deepest longings of human passion, are at stake, 
waiting as for the fall of a die. Philosophy loves such 
situations, I say, and loves, too, to keep its scrutiny as 
cool in the midst of them as if it were watching a game 
of chess, instead of the great world-game. Well, try the 
darker choice that the dilemma gives you. The world 
yonder shall be an x , an unknowable something, outer, 
problematic, foreign, opaque. And you, — you shall look 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


365 


upon it and believe in it. Yes, you shall for argument’s 
sake first put on an air of resigned confidence, and say, 
“ I do not only fancy it to be an extra-mental and un- 
knowable something there, an impenetrable x, but I know 
it to be such. I can’t help it. I did n’t make it unknow¬ 
able. I regret the fact. But there it is. I have to ad¬ 
mit its existence. But I know that I shall never solve 
the problem of its nature.” Ah, its nature is a problem, 
then. But what do you mean by this “ problem ” ? 
Problems are, after a fashion, rather familiar things, — 
that is, in the world of ideas. There are problems soluble 
and problems insoluble in that world of ideas. It is a 
soluble problem if one asks what whole number is the 
square root of 64. The answer is 8. It is an insoluble 
prbblem if one asks me to find what whole number is the 
square root of 65. There is, namely, no such whole num¬ 
ber. If one asks me to name the length of a straight 
line that shall be equal to the circumference of a circle of 
a known radius, that again, in the world of ideas, is an 
insoluble problem, because, as can be proved, the circum¬ 
ference of a circle is a length that cannot possibly be ex¬ 
actly expressed in terms of any statable number when 
the radius is of a stated length. So in the world of ideas, 
problems are definite questions which can be asked in know- 
able terms. Fair questions of this sort either may be 
fairly answered in our present state of knowledge, Or else 
they could be answered if we knew a little or a good deal 
more, or finally they could not possibly be answered. But 
in the latter case, if they could not possibly be answered, 
they always must resemble the problem how to square the 
circle. They then always turn out, namely, to be absurdly 
stated questions, and it is their absurdity that makes these 
problems absolutely insoluble. Any fair question could 
be answered by one who knew enough. No fair question 
has an unknowable answer. But now, if your unknow¬ 
able world out there is a thing of wholly, of absolutely 


366 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


problematic and inscrutable nature, is it so because you 
don’t yet know enough about it, or because in its very 
nature and essence it is an absurd thing, an x that 
would answer a question, which actually it is nonsense to 
ask? Surely one must choose the former alternative. 
The real world may be unknown; it can’t be essentially 
unknowable. 

This subtlety is wearisome enough, I know, just here, 
but I shall not dwell long upon it. Plainly if the unknow¬ 
able world out there is through and through in its nature 
a really inscrutable problem, this must mean that in 
nature it resembles such problems as, What is the whole 
number that is the square root of 65 ? Or, What two 
adjacent hills are there that have no valley between them? 
For in the world of thought such are the only insoluble 
problems. All others either may now be solved, or 
would be solved if we knew more than we now do. But, 
once more, if this unknowable is only just the real world 
as now unknown to us, but capable some time of becoming 
known, then remember that, as we have just seen, only a 
mind can ever become an object known to a mind. If I 
know you as external to me, it is only because you are 
minds. If I can come to know any truth, it is only in 
so far as this truth is essentially mental, is an idea, is a 
thought, that I can ever come to know it. Hence, if that 
so-called unknowable, that unknown outer world there, 
ever could, by any device, come within our ken, then it is 
already an ideal world. For just that is what our whole 
idealistic analysis has been proving. Only ideas are 
knowable. And nothing absolutely unknowable can exist. 
For the absolutely unknowable, the x pure and simple, 
the Kantian thing in itself, simply cannot be admitted. 
The notion of it is nonsense. The assertion of it is a con¬ 
tradiction. Pound-squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and 
Snarks, and Boojums, and Jabberwocks, and Abracada¬ 
bras ; such, I insist, are the only unknowables there are. 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


367 


The unknown, that which our human and finite selfhood 
has n’t grasped, exists spread out before us in a bound¬ 
less world of truth ; but the unknowable is essentially, 
confessedly, ipso facto a fiction. 

The nerve of our whole argument in the foregoing is 
now pretty fairly exposed. We have seen that the outer 
truth must be, if anything, a “ possibility of experience.” 
But we may now see that a bare “ possibility ” as such, is, 
like the unknowable, something meaningless. That 
which, whenever I come to know it, turns out to be 
through and through an idea, an experience, must be in 
itself, before I know it, either somebody’s idea, somebody’s 
experience, or it must be nothing. What is a “ possibil¬ 
ity ” of experience that is outside of me, and that is still 
nothing for any one one else than myself? Is n’t it a bare 
x , a nonsense phrase ? Is n’t it like an unseen color, an 
untasted taste, an unfelt feeling? In proving that the 
world is one of “ possible ” experience, we have proved 
that in so far as it is real it is one of actual experience. 

Once more, then, to sum up here, if however vast the 
world of the unknown, only the essentially knowable can 
exist, and if everything knowable is an idea, a mental 
somewhat, the content of some mind, then once for all we 
are the world of ideas. Your deepest doubt proves this. 
Only the nonsense of that inscrutable cc, of that Abraca¬ 
dabra, of that Snark, the Unknowable of whose essence 
you make your real world, prevents you from seeing this. 

To return, however, to our dilemma. Either ideal¬ 
ism, we said, or the unknowable. What we have now 
said is that the absolutely unknowable is essentially an 
absurdity, a non-existent. For any fair and statable 
problem admits of an answer. If the world exists yonder, 
its essence is then already capable of being known by 
some mind. If capable of being known by a mind, this 
essence is then already essentially ideal and mental. A 
mind that knew the real world would, for instance, find it 


368 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


a something possessing qualities. But qualities are ideal 
existences, just as much as are the particular qualities 
called odors or tones or colors. A mind knowing the real 
world would again find in it relations, such as equality 
and inequality, attraction and repulsion, likeness and 
unlikeness. But such relations have no meaning except 
as objects of a mind. In brief, then, the world as known 
would be found to be a world that had all the while been 
ideal and mental, even before it became known to the 
particular mind that we are to conceive as coming into 
connection with it. Thus, then, we are driven to the sec¬ 
ond alternative. The real world must be a mind, or else 
a group of minds. 

IY. 

But with this result we come in presence of a final 
problem. All this, you say, depends upon my assurance 
that there is after all a real and therefore an essentially 
knowable and rational world yonder. Such a world would 
have to be in essence a mind, or a world of minds. But 
after all, how does one ever escape from the prison of the 
inner life ? Am I not in all this merely wandering amidst 
the realm of my own ideas ? My world, of course, is n’t 
and can’t be a mere x , an essentially unknowable thing, 
just because it is my world, and I have an idea of it. But 
then does not this mean that my world is, after all, for¬ 
ever just my world, so that I never get to any truth beyond 
myself? Is n’t this result very disheartening? My world 
is thus a world of ideas, but alas! how do I then ever 
reach those ideas of the minds beyond me ? 

The answer is a simple, but in one sense a very prob¬ 
lematic one. You, in one sense, namely, never do or can 
get beyond your own ideas, nor ought you to wish to do so, 
because in truth all those other minds that constitute your 
outer and real world are in essence one with your own self. 
This whole world of ideas is essentially one world, and so 
it is essentially the world of one self and That art Thou. 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


369 


The truth and meaning of this deepest proposition of 
all idealism is now not at all remote from us. The con¬ 
siderations, however, upon which it depends are of the 
dryest possible sort, as commonplace as they are deep. 

Whatever objects you may think about, whether they 
are objects directly known to you, or objects infinitely far 
removed, objects in the distant stars, or objects remote in 
time, or objects near and present, — such objects, then, as 
a number with fifty places of digits in it, or the moun¬ 
tains on the other side of the moon, or the day of your 
death, or the character of Cromwell, or the law of gravi¬ 
tation, or a name that you are just now trying to think of 
and have forgotten, or the meaning of some mood or feel¬ 
ing or idea now in your mind, — all such objects, I insist, 
stand in a certain constant and curious relation to your 
mind whenever you are thinking about them, — a relation 
that we often miss because it is so familiar. What is 
this relation ? Such an object, while you think about it, 
need n’t be, as popular thought often supposes it to be, 
the cause of your thoughts concerning it. Thus, when 
you think about Cromwell’s character, Cromwell’s charac¬ 
ter is n’t just now causing any ideas in you, — is n’t, so to 
speak, doing anything to you. Cromwell is dead, and af¬ 
ter life’s fitful fever his character is a very inactive thing. 
Not as the cause , but as the object of your thought is Crom¬ 
well present to you. Even so, if you choose now to think 
of the moment of your death, that moment is somewhere 
off there in the future, and you can make it your object, 
but it is n’t now an active cause of your ideas. The mo¬ 
ment of your death has no present physical existence at 
all, and just now causes nothing. So, too, with the moun¬ 
tains on the other side of the moon. When you make 
them the object of your thought, they remain indifferent 
to you. They do not affect you. You never saw them. 
But all the same you can think about them. 

Yet this thinking about things is, after all, a very curi- 


370 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


ous relation in which to stand to things. In order to 
think about a thing, it is not enough that I should have 
an idea in me that merely resembles that thing. This 
last is a very important observation. I repeat, it is not 
enough that I should merely have an idea in me that re¬ 
sembles the thing whereof I think. I have, for instance, 
in me the idea of a pain. Another man has a pain just like 
mine. Say we both have toothache ; or have both burned 
our finger-tips in the same way. Now my idea of pain is 
just like the pain in him, but I am not on that account 
necessarily thinking about his pain, merely because what 
I am thinking about, namely my own pain, resembles his 
pain. No; to think about an object you must not merely 
have an idea that resembles the object, but you must mean 
to have your idea resemble that object. Stated in other 
form, to think of an object you must consciously aim at 
that object, you must pick out that object, you must al¬ 
ready in some measure possess that object enough, namely, 
to identify it as what you mean. But how can you mean, 
how can you aim at, how can you possess, how can you 
pick out, how can you identify what is not already pres¬ 
ent in essence to your own hidden self ? Here is surely a 
deep question. When you aim at yonder object, be it the 
mountains in the moon or the day of your death, you 
really say, “ I, as my real self, as my larger self, as my 
complete consciousness, already in deepest truth possess 
that object, have it, own it, identify it. And that, and 
that alone, makes it possible for me in my transient, my in¬ 
dividual, my momentary personality, to mean yonder ob¬ 
ject, to inquire about it, to be partly aware of it and partly 
ignorant of it.” You can’t mean what is utterly foreign 
to you. You mean an object, you assert about it, you talk 
about it, yes, you doubt or wonder about it, you admit 
your private and individual ignorance about it, only in so 
far as your larger self, your deeper personality, your to¬ 
tal of normal consciousness already has that object. Your 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


371 


momentary and private wonder, ignorance, inquiry, or 
assertion, about the object, implies, asserts, presupposes, 
that your total self is in full and immediate possession of 
the object. This, in fact, is the very nature of that curi¬ 
ous relation of a thought to an object which we are now 
considering. The self that is doubting or asserting, or 
that is even feeling its private ignorance about an object, 
and that still, even in consequence of all this, is meaning , 
is aiming at such object, is in essence identical with the 
self for which this object exists in its complete and con¬ 
sciously known truth. 

So paradoxical seems this final assertion of idealism 
that I cannot hope in one moment to make it very plain to 
you. It is a difficult topic, about which I have elsewhere 
printed a very lengthy research, 1 wherewith I cannot here 
trouble you. But what I intend by thus saying that the 
self which thinks about an object, which really, even in 
the midst of the blindest ignorance and doubt concerning 
its object still means the object,—that this self is identi¬ 
cal with the deeper self which possesses and truly knows 
the object, — what I intend hereby I can best illustrate 
by simple cases taken from your own experience. You 
are in doubt, say, about a name that you have forgotten, 
or about a thought that you just had, but that has now 
escaped you. As you hunt for the name or the lost idea, 
you are all the while sure that you mean just one particu¬ 
lar name or idea and no other. But you don’t yet know 
what name or idea this is. You try, and reject name after 
name. You query, “Was this what I was thinking of, 
or this ? ” But after searching you erelong find the name 
or the idea, and now at once you recognize it. “Oh, 
that,” you say, “ was what I meant all along, only — I 
did n’t know what I meant.” Did not know ? Yes, in one 
sense you knew all the while, — that is, your deeper self, 

1 See The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885), ch. xi., 
“ The Possibility of Error,” pp. 384-435. 


372 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


your true consciousness knew. It was your momentary 
self that did not know. But when you found the long- 
sought name, recalled the lost idea, you recognized it at 
once, because it was all the while your own, because you, 
the true and larger self, who owned the name or the idea 
and were aware of what it was, now were seen to include 
the smaller and momentary self that sought the name or 
tried to recall the thought. Your deeper consciousness of 
the lost idea was all the while there. In fact, did you not 
presuppose this when you sought the lost idea ? How can 
I mean a name, or an idea, unless I in truth am the self 
who knows the name, who possesses the idea ? In hunting 
for the name or the lost idea, I am hunting for my own 
thought. Well, just so I know nothing about the far-off 
stars in detail, but in so far as I mean the far-off stars at 
all, as I speak of them, I am identical with that remote 
and deep thought of my own that already knows the stars. 
When I study the stars, I am trying to find out what I 
really mean by them. To be sure, only experience can 
tell me, but that is because only experience can bring 
me into relation with my larger self. The escape from 
the prison of the inner self is simply the fact that the in¬ 
ner self is through and through an appeal to a larger self. 
The self that inquires, either inquires without meaning, 
or if it has a meaning, this meaning exists in and for the 
larger self that knows. 

Here is a suggestion of what I mean by Synthetic Ideal¬ 
ism. No truth, I repeat, is more familiar. That I am 
always meaning to inquire into objects beyond me, what 
clearer fact could be mentioned ? That only in case it is 
already I who, in deeper truth, in my real and hidden 
thought, know the lost object yonder, the object whose na¬ 
ture I seek to comprehend, that only in this case I can 
truly mean the thing yonder, — this, as we must assert, is 
involved in the very idea of meaning . That is the logical 
analysis of it. You can mean what your deeper self 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


373 


knows; you cannot mean what your deeper self does n’t 
know. To be sure, the complete illustration of this most 
critical insight of idealism belongs elsewhere. Few see 
the familiar. Nothing is more common than for people 
to think that they mean objects that have nothing to do 
with themselves. Kant it was, who, despite his things in 
themselves, first showed us that nobody really means an 
object, really knows it, or doubts it, or aims at it, unless he 
does so by aiming at a truth that is present to his own 
larger self. Except for the unity of my true self, taught 
Kant, I have no objects. And so it makes no difference 
whether I know a thing or am in doubt about it. So 
long as I really mean it, that is enough. The self that 
means the object is identical with the larger self that 
possesses the object, just as when you seek the lost idea 
you are already in essence with the self that possesses the 
lost idea. 

In this way I suggest to you the proof which a rigid 
analysis of the logic of our most commonplace thought 
would give for the doctrine that in the world there is but 
one Self, and that it is his world which we all alike are 
truly meaning, whether we talk of one another or of 
Cromwell’s character or of the fixed stars or of the far- 
off aeons of the future. The relation of my thought to 
its object has, I insist, this curious character, that unless 
the thought and its object are parts of one larger thought, 
I can’t even be meaning that object yonder, can’t even 
be in error about it, can’t even doubt its existence. You, 
for instance, are part of one larger self with me, or else 
I can’t even be meaning to address you as outer beings. 
You are part of one larger self along with the most mys¬ 
terious or most remote fact of nature, along with the 
moon, and all the hosts of heaven, along with all truth 
and all beauty. Else could you not even intend to speak 
of such objects beyond you. For whatever you speak of 
you will find that your world is meant by you as just 


874 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


your world. Talk of the unknowable, and it forthwith 
becomes your unknowable, your problem, whose solution, 
unless the problem be a mere nonsense question, your 
larger self must own and be aware of. The deepest prob¬ 
lem of life is, “ What is this deeper self? ” And the only 
answer is, It is the self that knows in unity all truth . 
This, I insist, is no hypothesis. It is actually the pre¬ 
supposition of your deepest doubt. And that is why 
I say: Everything finite is more or less obscure, dark, 
doubtful. Only the Infinite Self, the problem-solver, the 
complete thinker, the one who knows what we mean even 
when we are most confused and ignorant, the one who in¬ 
cludes us, who has the world present to himself in unity, 
before whom all past and future truth, all distant and 
dark truth is clear in one eternal moment, to whom far 
and forgot is near, who thinks the whole of nature, and 
in whom are all things, the Logos, the world-possessor, — 
only his existence, I say, is perfectly sure. 


y. 

Yet I must not state the outcome thus confidently with¬ 
out a little more analysis and exemplification. Let me 
put the whole matter in a slightly different way. When a 
man believes that he knows any truth about a fact beyond 
his present and momentary thought, what is the position, 
with reference to that fact, which he gives himself? We 
must first answer, He believes that one who really knew 
his, the thinker’s, thought, and compared it with the fact 
yonder, would perceive the agreement between the two. 
Is this all , however, that the believer holds to be true of 
of his own thought ? No, not so, for he holds not only 
that his thought, as it is, agrees with some fact outside his 
present self (as my thought, for instance, of my toothache 
may agree with the fact yonder called my neighbor’s 
toothache), but also that his thought agrees with the 
fact with which it meant to agree. To mean to agree, 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


375 


however, with a specific fact beyond my present self, in¬ 
volves such a relation to that fact that if I could somehow 
come directly into the presence of the fact itself, could 
somehow absorb it into my present consciousness, I should 
become immediately aware of it as the fact that I all 
along had meant. Our previous examples have been in¬ 
tended to bring clearly before us this curious and in fact 
unique character of the relation called meaning an ob¬ 
ject of our thought. To return, then, to our supposed 
believer: he believes that he knows some fact beyond his 
present consciousness. This involves, as we have now 
seen, the assertion that he believes himself to stand in 
such an actual relation to the fact yonder that were it in, 
instead of out of his present consciousness, he would rec¬ 
ognize it both as the object meant by his present thought, 
and also as in agreement therewith; and it is all this which, 
as he believes, an immediate observer of his own thought 
and of the object — that is, an observer who should in¬ 
clude our believer’s present self, and the fact yonder, and 
who should reflect on their relations — would find as 
the real relation. Observe, however, that only by reflec¬ 
tion would this higher observer find out that real relation. 
Nothing but Beflective Self-consciousness could discover 
it. To believe that you know anything beyond your pre¬ 
sent and momentary self, is, therefore, to believe that you 
do stand in such a relation to truth as only a larger and 
reflectively observant self, that included you and your 
object, could render intelligible. Or once more, so to 
believe is essentially to appeal confidently to a possible 
larger self for approval. But now to say, I know a truth, 
and yet to say, This larger self to whom I appeal is ap¬ 
pealed to only as to a possible self, that need n’t be real, 
— all this involves just the absurdity against which our 
whole idealistic analysis has been directed in case of all 
the sorts of fact and truth in the world. To believe, is to 
say, I stand in a real relation to truth, a relation which 


376 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

transcends wholly my present momentary self; and this 
real relation is of such a curious nature that only a larger 
inclusive self which consciously reflected upon my mean¬ 
ing and consciously possessed the object that I mean, 
could know or grasp the reality of the relation. If, how¬ 
ever, this relation is a real one, it must, like the colors, 
the sounds, and all the other things of which we spoke be¬ 
fore be real for somebody. Bare possibilities are nothing. 
Really possible things are already in some sense real. 
If, then, my relation to the truth, this complex relation of 
meaning an object and conforming to it, when the object, 
although at this moment meant by me, is not now present 
to my momentary thought, — if this relation is genuine, 
and yet is such as only a possible larger self could render 
intelligible, then my possible larger self must be real in 
order that my momentary self should in fact possess the 
truth in question. Or, in briefest form, The relation of 
conforming one’s thought to an outer object meant by 
this thought is a relation which only a Reflective Larger 
Self could grasp or find real. If the relation is real, the 
larger self is real, too. 

So much, then, for the case when one believes that one 
has grasped a truth beyond the moment. But now for 
the case when one is actually in error about some object 
of his momentary and finite thought. Error is the actual 
failure to agree, not with any fact taken at random, but 
with just the fact that one had meant to agree with. 
Under what circumstances, then, is error possible? Only 
in case one’s real thought, by virtue of its meaning, does 
transcend his own momentary and in so far ignorant self. 
As the true believer, meaning the truth that he believes, 
must be in real relation thereto, even so the blunderer, 
really meaning, as he does, the fact yonder, in order that 
he should be able even to blunder about it, must be, in so 
far, in the same real relation to truth as the true believer* 
His error lies in missing that conformity with the meant 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


377 


object at which he aimed. None the less, however, did he 
really mean and really aim ; and, therefore, is he in error, 
because his real and larger self finds him to be so. True 
thinking and false thinking alike involve, then, the same 
fundamental conditions, in so far as both are carried on 
in moments; and in so far as, in both cases, the false 
moment and the true are such by virtue of being organic 
parts of a larger, critical, reflective, and so conscious 
self. 

To sum up so far: Of no object do I speak either 
falsely or truly, unless I mean that object. Never do I 
mean an object, unless I stand in such relation thereto 
that were the object in this conscious moment, and imme¬ 
diately present to me, I should myself recognize it as 
completing and fulfilling my present and momentary 
meaning. The relation of meaning an object is thus one 
that only conscious Reflection can define, or observe, or 
constitute. No merely foreign observer, no external test, 
could decide upon what is meant at any moment. There¬ 
fore, when what is meant is outside of the moment which 
means, only a Self inclusive of the moment and its object 
could complete, and so confirm or refute, the opinion that 
the moment contains. Really to mean an object, then, 
whether in case of true opinion or in case of false opinion, 
involves the real possibility of such a reflective test of 
one’s meaning from the point of view of a larger self. 
But to say, My relation to the object is such that a reflec¬ 
tive larger self, and only such a reflective and inclusive 
self, could see that I meant the object, is to assert a fact, 
a relation, an existent truth in the world, that either is a 
truth for nobody, or is a truth for an actual reflective 
self, inclusive of the moment, and critical of its meaning. 
Our whole idealistic analysis, however, from the begin¬ 
ning of this discussion, has been to the effect that facts 
must be facts for somebody, and can’t be facts for nobody, 
and that bare possibilities are really impossible. Hence 


378 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


whoever believes, whether truly or falsely, about objects 
beyond the moment of his belief, is an organic part of a 
reflective and conscious larger self that has those objects 
immediately present to itself, and has them in organic 
relation with the erring or truthful momentary self that 
believes. 

Belief, true and false, having been examined, the case 
of doubt follows at once. To doubt about objects beyond 
my momentary self is to admit the “ possibility of error ” 
as to such objects. Error would involve my inclusion in 
a larger self that has directly present to it the object 
meant by me as I doubt. Truth would involve the same 
inclusion. The inclusion itself, then, is, so far, no object 
of rational doubt. To doubt the inclusion would be 
merely to doubt whether I meant anything at all beyond 
the moment, and not to doubt as to my particular know¬ 
ledge about the nature of some object beyond, when once 
the object had been supposed to be meant. Doubt pre¬ 
supposes then, whenever it is a definite doubt, the real 
possibility, and so, in the last analysis, the reality of the 
normal self-consciousness that possesses the object con¬ 
cerning which one doubts. 

But if, passing to the extreme of skepticism, and stating 
one’s most despairing and most uncompromising doubt, 
one so far confines himself to the prison of the inner 
life as to doubt whether one ever does mean any object 
beyond the moment at all, there comes the final consider¬ 
ation that in doubting one’s power to transcend the mo¬ 
ment, one has already transcended the moment, just as we 
found in following Hegel’s analysis : 1 To say, It is im¬ 
possible to mean any object beyond this moment of my 
thought, and the moment is for itself “ the measure of all 
things,” is at all events to give a meaning to the words 
this moment. And this moment means something only in 
opposition to other moments. Yes, even in saying this 
1 See, in the lecture on Hegel, pp. 204-207. 


REALITY AND IDEALISM. 


379 


moment , I have already left this moment, and am mean¬ 
ing and speaking of a past moment. Moreover, to deny 
that one can mean an object “ beyond the moment ” is 
already to give a meaning to the phrase beyond the mo¬ 
ment , and then to deny that anything is meant to fall 
within the scope of this meaning. In every case, then, 
one must trauscend by one’s meaning the moment to 
which one is confined by one’s finitude. 

Flee where we will, then, the net of the larger Self en¬ 
snares us. We are lost and imprisoned in the thickets 
of its tangled labyrinth. The moments are not at all in 
themselves, for as moments they have no meaning; they 
exist only in relation to the beyond. The larger Self 
alone is, and they are by reason of it, organic parts of it. 
They perish, but it remains; they have truth or error 
only in its overshadowing presence. 

And now, as to the unity of this Self. Can there be 
many such organic selves, mutually separate unities of 
moments and of the objects that these moments mean ? 
Nay, were there many such, would not their manifoldness 
be a truth ? Their relations, would not these be real ? 
Their distinct places in the world-order, would not these 
things be objects of possible true or false thoughts ? If 
so, must not there be once more the inclusive real Self for 
whom these truths were true, these separate selves inter¬ 
related, and their variety absorbed in the organism of its 
rational meaning ? 

There is, then, at last, but one Self, organically, reflec¬ 
tively, consciously inclusive of all the selves, and so of all 
truth. I have called this self, Logos, problem-solver, all- 
knower. Consider, then, last of all, his relation to prob¬ 
lems. In the previous lecture we doubted many things; 
we questioned the whole seeming world of the outer order; 
we wondered as to space and time, as to nature and evo¬ 
lution, as to the beginning and the end of things. Now 
he who wonders is like him who doubts. Has his wonder 


880 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


any rationality about it ? Does he mean anything by his 
doubt ? Then the truth that he means, and about which 
he wonders, has its real constitution. As wonderer, he 
in the moment possesses not this solving truth; he appeals 
to the self who can solve. That self must possess the 
solution just as surely as the problem has a meaning. 
The real nature of space and time, the real beginning of 
things, where matter was at any point of time in the past, 
what is to become of the world’s energy: these are mat¬ 
ters of truth, and truth is necessarily present to the Self 
as in one all-comprehending self-completed moment, be¬ 
yond which is naught, within which is the world. 

The world, then, is such stuff as ideas are made of. 
Thought possesses all things. But the world is n’t unreal. 
It extends infinitely beyond our private consciousness, 
because it is the world of an universal mind. What facts 
it is to contain only experience can inform us. There is 
no magic that can anticipate the work of science. Abso¬ 
lutely the only thing sure from the first about this world, 
however, is that it is intelligent, rational, orderly, essen¬ 
tially comprehensible, so that all its problems are some¬ 
where solved, all its darkest mysteries are known to the 
supreme Self. This Self infinitely and reflectively tran¬ 
scends our consciousness, and therefore, since it includes 
us, it is at the very least a person, and more definitely 
conscious than we are ; for what it possesses is self-reflect¬ 
ing knowledge, and what is knowledge aware of itself, 
but consciousness ? Beyond the seeming wreck and chaos 
of our finite problems, its eternal insight dwells, there¬ 
fore, in absolute and supreme majesty. Yet it is not far 
from every one of us. There is no least or most transient 
thought that flits through a child’s mind, or that troubles 
with the faintest line of care a maiden’s face, and that 
still does not contain and embody something of this divine 
Logos. 


LECTUKE XII. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM: — THE WORLD OF 

DESCRIPTION AND THE WORLD OF APPRECIATION. 

We return from the general notion of the world as the 
universe of the Logos, to the business of trying to inter¬ 
pret the facts of experience. “Ye men of Galilee, why 
stand ye gazing up into heaven?” We must go into all 
the world and preach the gospel of this rationality and 
unity of the truth, until the most unspiritual and misbe¬ 
lieving of phenomena shall have been converted. Our 
business is not that of gazing, but of interpreting. And 
it is hard indeed so to interpret idealism that it shall seem 
to the ordinary mind anything but an idle comment upon 
the general connectedness of things. 

The business of the present lecture is with the idealistic 
interpretation of the outer order. In what precise sense 
is this world in space and in time still real for us ? Is 
the true world one of rigid necessity, or is it a world of 
free and spiritual ideals ? What place in it have the sci¬ 
entific notions of causality, and of such physical truths as 
energy and matter ? In what sense has the doctrine of 
evolution a place in this universe of the Logos ? Is this 
world a moral order ? And is it a world where a man’s 
mind is still dependent upon his nervous mechanism, as 
empirical science assures us? And what ultimate connec¬ 
tion does idealism recognize between finite mind and the 
truth that physical science calls matter ? 

These questions, technically called the problems of a 
philosophical cosmology, are before us. The study of 
them is hard and dry. The exposition must of necessity 


382 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


be in some places extremely intricate, in others far too 
dogmatic and aphoristic. The outcome may be unex¬ 
pected, and even light-giving. The fashion wherein we 
shall attack the undertaking will be in some respects dif¬ 
ferent from the traditional one ; but we shall still at every 
step be guided by the lessons of our historical lectures. 


i. 

Despite our idealism, and in fact even because of our 
idealism, the world of experience is to appear to us, in 
what follows, as at least the outward aspect of a genuinely 
real world. We have asked, What sort of a world is it t 
The answer has been, It is a world of outer and ideal 
truth, a world of mind. The doctrine of the idealist is 
not one that involves or encourages any doubt that there 
is truth beyond his own private and finite selfhood. A 
popular and trivial objection to idealism, often repeated 
by critics who comprehend it not, accuses each finite ideal¬ 
istic thinker of believing more in this his finite self than 
in anybody or anything else. But, on the contrary, as 
we have seen, it is only the idealist who has a reasonable 
account to give of his faith in outer truth, and of his own 
relation thereto. This outer truth is for him the content 
of the transcendent personality of the Logos, of whom our 
experience is a fragmentary suggestion. As I have 
pointed out elsewhere, in the book to which I have already 
referred, it is just the popular, the common-sense notion 
of external reality, for which the outer world is a bare 
postulate, a mere practical assumption . 1 Only idealism, 

1 Religious Aspect of Philosophy , pp. 304-305. — “ If the history 
of popular speculation on these topics could be written, how much of 
cowardice and shuffling would be found in the behavior of the nat¬ 
ural mind before the question : ‘ How dost thou know an external 
world ? ’ Instead of simply and plainly answeriug, ‘ I mean by the 
external world in the first place something that I accept or demand, 
that I posit, postulate, actually construct on the basis of sense-data,* 
the natural man gives us all kinds of vague compromise answers. . .. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


383 


with its theory of the world of the Logos as the one objec¬ 
tive reality, implied by every doubt and half-conscious 
belief of every finite fragment of this true self, finds a 
warrant for the postulates of common-sense, converts the 
mere faith in the outer world into an insight, possesses an 
objective truth in coming thus to an awareness of our 
relation to our own deepest nature, and interprets our own 
deepest nature by showing that it is not our finite self¬ 
hood merely as such, but is through and through objec¬ 
tive . 1 

ii. 

This being premised as to the idealist’s attitude towards 
the objective truth, our next undertaking must be, to 
define more exactly the characteristics that objective 
truth, as such, possesses. For such a definition will of 
necessity throw light on the nature of the world in which 
we find ourselves. This task is a very hard one, and can 
be accomplished only by advancing from one tentative 
definition to another. 

We must begin, therefore, with a provisional definition 
of the genuine outer reality as distinguished from any 
seeming outer world. What character, we ask, is the 
essential character of an objective truth as such ? What 
do we mean by the outer order ? The natural and provi- 

The ultimate motive with the every-day man is the will to have an 
external world. ... We construct but do not receive the external 
reality.” I quote this passage here because some of my critics have 
taken it, strangely enough, as the expression of my own idealism. 
On the contrary, it is expressly stated in the book in question as the 
substance of the popular and every-day point of view, to which only 
a genuine idealism ever gives any sound and objective basis. 

1 It is of this objective truth that on p. 332 of the Religious A sped 
I ventured to speak as of something “ not our postulate.” Of this 
absolute aspect of the outer truth, later chapters of that work sought 
to give proof. Yet, in common with other objective idealists, I 
have occasionally had the fortune to be spoken of as one who does 
not pretend to know any truth beyond the finite self, but only to pos¬ 
tulate such truth. 


384 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


sionally acceptable answer is, that from our human point 
of view, the outer order, in so far at least as it is the 
object of science, is simply so much of the truth of the 
self as is revealed, through our experience, and to our 
finite consciousness, in aspects that are universal and 
abiding, and not merely private, fleeting, and momentary. 
The contrast between the inner and the outer is generally 
recognized, in fact, as the contrast between the transient 
and the permanent in our outer experience. What per¬ 
sists in experience, must, we say, correspond to some real 
truth beyond our private selves. In this sense we call a 
dream unreal, because all the dream-people and the 
dream-objects vanish when we awake. On the other 
hand, we call the matter of physical nature real, because 
its quantity appears to be unchangeable, in so far as our 
experience enables us to measure this quantity. For a 
similar reason it is that Professor Tait has frequently 
argued that from the physical point of view the two cer¬ 
tain realities of the outer order are matter and energy 
(the latter being distinguished very decidedly from what 
is technically called force). For these two, says Profes¬ 
sor Tait, are permanent throughout the whole range of 
scientific experience. But at all events, whether any 
given theory as to what the permanent elements in expe¬ 
rience may be proves correct or no, it seems very fair 
indeed to say, at the outset, that the objective, the outer 
reality is for us mortals that which is experienced as 
enduring. 

Yet permanence, as such, is not the only character of 
the reality that we call outer. There is another character, 
closely associated with permanence, that is of still deeper 
meaning. We are accustomed, namely, to distinguish the 
inner from the outer by saying that their contrast is that 
between what only some one finite consciousness, or only 
a certain limited number of such consciousnesses expe¬ 
rience, in their relative and fleeting life of limitations, 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


385 


and that which all must experience, in so far as they 
share in a common rationality. As I now am, I feel pain 
or pleasure. That is, in itself considered, just my pain or 
pleasure, in so far as I am this finite and changing bit 
of a self, bound here to these moments of time. That 
pleasure or pain, then, for the first, exists only in me and 
in nobody else. The world of the true and absolute Self 
contains that fact, but contains it here only. The true 
Self has the pleasure or pain, but only in so far forth as 
he is limited to me. You know nothing directly concern¬ 
ing it. You are another bit of a self, like me ; you have 
your feelings, I mine. Tt is true that in order even to be 
thus bounded in time and experience, we must have a real 
and organic communion of life in and through the one 
Spirit. It is he who feels and works in us. No fragment 
of our life but is his. But our feelings, the facts of our 
inner life as such, are his only in so far as he is conceived 
under the form and the limitations of our various finite 
selves and moments of life. —. 

On the other hand, I now can think of numbers, and 
when I think that three and two together make five, I 
think by virtue indeed of feelings that are mine and not 
yours, but with reference to a truth that I mean, and that 
in the finite and individual sense of the words is neither 
yours nor mine, but that is truth for all of us. So space 
and time, if indeed they are more than mere seemings of 
our human point of view, are such universal and conse¬ 
quently ever present truths. To say that space and time 
are objectively real is to say, then, that these things, re¬ 
vealed though they are through your feelings and through 
mine (and so far merely facts of the inner life), are yet 
truth for all of us, like the numbers, and not only for all 
of us men, but for every intelligent bit of a self in all the 
universe, be he archangel or dweller in Mars. To doubt 
the reality of space is to doubt just this opinion . 1 

1 An objector may say that, if this account of the nature of outer 


386 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


There is, then, for us, this provisional contrast between 
the inner order and the outer. Whether this contrast 
expresses the last word of philosophy, we have yet to see. 
So far it is n’t a contrast that enables us to separate the 
two orders, but it is one that does enable us to distinguish 
them. This contrast is that between the permanent and 
universal elements of experience on the one hand, and 
the private and fleeting elements of experience on the 
other. Our finite life has its inner aspect in so far as it 
is just individual, the truth of our moments as such, the 
breaking of just our waves of consciousness on the beach. 
But our finite consciousness relates to outer and physical 
truth in so far as it means something that may be pre¬ 
sent for any and all intelligent moments and individuals. 
When one questions, as we did in an earlier lecture, 

truth be even provisionally accepted, the laws of number would be 
objectively true in no other sense than the laws of physics. But (so 
the objector will ask) are numbers real in the same sense in which 
matter is real ? I answer, It is a familiar proposition of what is 
called modern positivism in philosophy that the laws of arithmetic, 
of geometry, and of mathematics generally, are merely physical 
truths of a peculiar simplicity and abstractness. This proposition 
of positivism I fully accept. Numbers, in so far as they are ab¬ 
stractions, are indeed unreal, because our experience is always of a 
number of physical facts. But the laws of arithmetic are laws of 
the physical world, and are true because they are so. To be sure, 
the physical world is not what many who call themselves positivists 
take it to be. It is the world of the truth, in so far forth as this 
truth is public property for all finite intelligences ; it is the world of 
the truth that lasts, and that can be shared, that is n’t the private 
property of momentary consciousness, like our feelings, but that, 
although revealed to each of us through his feelings, has a commu¬ 
nicable, an universal aspect. In this sense, the principle that three 
and two make five, or such a principle as the binomial theorem, is 
3s genuinely physical a law as is the law of gravitation ; save that 
the last-mentioned law deals with a far more complex and concrete 
reality, and may have, for that very reason, a far more limited scope. 
In what sense the arithmetical laws are a priori and absolutely uni* 
versal, we shall see later. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


387 


whether the world of the interwoven spirals and streams 
of stars, the world of the consolidating matter and of the 
“ running down ” energy, is what it seems to be, one’s 
question means this: Is this world that we men have been 
thinking out as we interpreted our human feelings, a 
world of truth that would necessarily be present to other 
than human intelligences in the same form as those in 
which it is present to us ? If the archangels can count, 
if the inhabitants of Mars can add, they will all agree 
with us that three and two make five. But we know not 
as yet whether they would or would not, in case they came 
to think of the same truth that we think of when we look 
at the stars, agree with us as to the forms and laws of 
this truth. Therefore, and in no other sense, do we 
doubt whether the world of the stars is what it seems, 
and whether we are after all playing with the “ pebbles 
on the beach.” 

in. 

What we want, then, next in order, is a fuller state¬ 
ment of what is implied in this provisional criterion of 
objectivity. Each of us is thinking in more or less frag’- 
mentary ways and moments. We want some means of 
distinguishing the essentially private in our thoughts from 
the permanent, the public, and the universal. 

Our effort to define such a criterion must begin in an 
extremely naive and simple fashion. If I am dealing 
with my neighbor, and he says that he has experiences 
which stand for outer truth, and which are n’t merely his 
private feelings, my first disposition is to demand that he 
shall put me where I can get these experiences, too, or 
something that we shall both recognize as similar expe¬ 
riences. If he sees a rainbow, and regards it as standing 
for a real and outer truth, as being essentially an objec¬ 
tive idea, and I doubt that he sees the rainbow, I ask 
to be shown it. If, looking towards the quarter of the 
heavens to which he points, I see that to which I readily 


388 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


apply the same name, I am quickly convinced, from the 
point of view of untutored common sense, that we are both 
seeing the same rainbow. A very close and critical ob¬ 
servation would, however, erelong prove to us both, as 
he and I moved about, that his rainbow and mine do not 
occupy precisely the same apparent place, with reference 
to our experiences of other objects. If we become aware 
of this fact, we may first begin to differ as to whose rain¬ 
bow is the real one, and later, with proper instruction, we 
shall come to see that just because an essential character 
of the visible rainbow, namely, its seeming place in the 
world of the things upon whose reality we are already 
agreed, is a matter of the point of view, the rainbow it¬ 
self must have a decidedly different sort of physical 
objectivity from that possessed by other objects, say, for 
instance, trees and mountains. 

So far, then, the test of objectivity is the apparent 
similarity of our human experiences when two or more 
of us are in given circumstances. This similarity, how¬ 
ever, is critically examined by comparing, as far as pos¬ 
sible, the accounts that we can give to one another of the 
relations amongst the objects of our experience. In 
other words, the test of objectivity is, so far, permanence 
and community of ideas, and the test of the permanence 
and community of ideas is the sameness of the descrip¬ 
tion that we can give to one another of the relations 
amongst the various parts of our private experience. 

Here at once appears an important distinction in our 
private experiences themselves. As they come to us, they 
are very complex, and they interest us from moment to 
moment in ways that embody just our private mood. But 
one interest we take in them which brings to pass for us 
just that distinction upon which the whole of natural 
science depends. This is the interest in describing them. 
The distinction that it introduces is one between what ia 
describable , and what is only appreciable . As my expe* 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


389 


rience comes to me at any moment, I may, namely, be 
said to appreciate it in some fashion. That is, it feels 
to me so or so. I like it or I hate it. Or again, where 
pleasure and pain are n’t marked, still there is an essen¬ 
tially indescribable value that my experience has for me 
when regarded just as my own feeling. Tastes have one 
sort of worth for me, colors another. An electric shock 
from a Leyden jar is appreciated as a peculiar and atro¬ 
cious interruption of all other trains of feeling, such that 
its painful value is surely, but inexpressibly, different 
from that of all other experiences. Such elementary and 
personal interests in the passing moment, such essentially 
dumb appreciations, have in them few elements or none 
whereby we can test whether or no we have them in 
common with our neighbors. Real sympathy, real shar¬ 
ing of even the most elementary appreciations there may 
be ; and of the significance of such, in case they exist, we 
shall hear something later on. For the moment we are 
disposed to call our elementary appreciations indescrib¬ 
able, and to regard them as the most characteristic in¬ 
stances of private and individual experience, which reveal 
merely wie es uns zu Muthe ist , not what can be called 
objective. 

On the other hand, there are certain elements of our 
experience which we regard as describable. How my own 
hat feels when I pick it up, taking it from amongst a large 
number of hats in a dimly lighted cloak-room, is something 
that I can only appreciate. I know my hat by the feel 
of it when I pick it up. How I know it I can’t tell you. 
On the other hand, that I find my hat hung a peg higher 
than I myself left it, that it is hung on the right or the 
left side of the room, that just as I took it the clock struck 
ten, these are experiences that I pretend to be able to 
describe. I can tell you, so I say, just what I mean by 
them. I hold them to be experiences that anybody might 
have, whether he felt about my hat as I do, or did not. 


390 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Now the character that makes an experience describa- 
ble, involves two facts concerning its nature. The first 
fact is that an experience, just in so far forth as it is 
describable, is reproducible at pleasure by the person who 
can describe it. For him, indeed, the act of description 
is always a voluntary and more or less complete or abbre¬ 
viated reproduction of the experience described. As he 
thus reproduces for the purpose of description, he has a 
sense of his own power over the reproduction. The feel¬ 
ing was confined to the moment; the description already 
involves a communication from moment to moment within 
a man’s own life. Here, already, is a partial interpreta¬ 
tion of the permanence which we before recognized as a 
character of outer truth. The describable, as such, has 
for us one sort of permanence. The second fact is that, in 
the unity of consciousness, the relations amongst feelings 
which permit us to describe the content of any moment 
must themselves fall under certain general types, or, as we 
more technically say, under either Forms or Categories of 
experience. By forms of experience we mean the charac¬ 
teristics which we express by saying that our experience 
involved ideas of space or of time; that is, that our feel- 
iugs were those of extensive size or of shape, or of dura¬ 
tion. By categories of experience we mean at present the 
characteristics which enable us to say, that what we expe¬ 
rienced consisted of one or of many feeling's, of like or of 
different feelings, or again, of feelings that differed from 
one another, or resembled one another, in quantity or in 
quality. There are many other such categories used in 
the work of physical science. Here is no place to enu¬ 
merate or to explain them. Our meaning at present is 
that the formless and uncategorized experience, in so 
far as it is such, appears, from our present and provi¬ 
sional point of view, a merely private appreciation, which 
does not reveal outer truth, while the well formed and 
sharply categorized experience is in so far regarded as 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


391 


capable of description, and therefore as apt to reveal 
outer truth. I can’t tell you much about the curious 
minor feelings of vague depression that once followed, in 
my own case, an attack of influenza. If ycu have passed 
through a similar experience, you may appreciate my feel¬ 
ings. But I can never be quite sure that you do. On 
the contrary, I can tell you, if I like, a good deal about 
any experience that I can define in terms of known geo¬ 
metrical figures, of numbers, of duration, of size, or of 
some law of the recurrence of experiences. “ Ten strokes 
of the clock,” “ two feet to the right,” “ a regular recur¬ 
rence of wind and rain, following, on several occasions, a 
rapidly falling barometer,” — all these are phrases of 
description, — not indeed of unlimited or of complete de¬ 
scription ; for all these phrases suggest elementary expe¬ 
riences of sound, of sight, and of other indescribable feel¬ 
ings, that are in so far mere appreciations. But they are 
phrases of description in so far as they express definite 
relations in space and in time, and relations that fall 
under such typical categories as quantity, number, recur¬ 
rence, likeness, regularity, and other such notions, —• these 
relations of experience being so far under our control that 
we can reproduce at will typical instances which exem¬ 
plify them. All such phrases pretend to tell something 
about a conceived outer reality. Of such is the kingdom 
of natural science. 

To recapitulate: (1) An experience is indescribable if 
I lose it beyond clear recall as soon as it is gone. In 
order to be describable it must contain aspects that I can 
reconstruct out of their elements at pleasure, so long as 
my intelligent memory lasts. I can describe only what I 
can keep and permanently think out. (2) In the next 
place, this my power to think out and reconstruct my 
experience must, in every case of description, depend 
upon my discovery of the forms and the categories that 
the experience exemplifies. (3) Only that which is re- 


392 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


vealed through our experience in describable form, how¬ 
ever, has, so far in our discussion, approved itself as 
objective, as public property, as universal. It may indeed 
be that we shall need to modify soon this provisional and 
tentative account; and that some of the objective truths 
are indescribable. But so far we have not found in¬ 
stances of the sort. Thus far describable facts and objec¬ 
tive facts mean pretty much the same thing for us who 
live under ordinary human limitations. The business of 
natural science is the “ description of the world of experi¬ 
ence.” And the real is so far the describable. 

With such a provisional definition of the real in mind, 
let us glance back at the world of the mere appreciations, 
to bring out the contrast now defined. The noblest and 
the most stupid appreciations, it would seem, may, and 
in many cases do alike exemplify this formless and uncate¬ 
gorized character of the merely private and so far illusory 
experience. On the other hand, the most artistically 
worthless fact in what we call nature, the physical thing 
that we appreciate least and regard as of least worth, will 
exemplify, in so far as it is an outer fact, this definable, 
this universal character, this conformity to rules of de¬ 
scription, this presence in space and in time, this submis¬ 
sion to categories, which together make natural science 
possible. The reasons in both •’cases appear so far to be 
ones already pointed out. What is describable is as such 
public property. A man who knows it once for what it 
is, and who keeps his wits, can think out its characters, 
can mentally reproduce the relationships of its elements, 
can tell his neighbor about it, and can feel tolerably sure 
that if any intelligent being got into the right place in 
the world-order, he too would experience something of 
much the same description, however colored his inner feel¬ 
ings might be. On the other hand, what is n't so defined 
by space and time and number and quantity, and the 
other types of intelligent experience, as to have the rela* 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


393 


tions of its parts describable is, first of all, when once it 
is past, like the “ tender grace of a day that is dead.” It 
comes not back. While it is present it is like “ the tears, 
idle tears,” whereof “ I know not what they mean.” It is 
like — 

“ That sense, which at the winds of spring 
In rarest visitation, or the voice 
Of one beloved, heard in youth alone, 

Fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim 
The radiant looks of unbewailing flowers, 

And leaves this peopled earth a solitude 
When it returns no more.” 

The merely appreciable, then, as such, is, in our human 
world, notoriously fleeting. So with all the lovely things 
in Schiller’s lines : — 

“ Warum bin ich verganglich, O Zeus ? So fragte die Schonlieit. 

Macht dich dock, sagte der Gott, nur das Vergangliche schon ! 

Und die Liebe, die Jugend, der Thau und die Blumen vernahmen 9 s ; 
Alle gingen sie weg, weinend von Jupiter’s Thron.” 

The atoms, as describable, seem thus far to be realities, 
and they survive. The noble emotions of youth and of 
lovers die. If \ however, this provisional definition of the 
real is to be in any way supplemented, and if the apprecia¬ 
tions too are to become of eternal significance, as the poets 
desire, then the appreciations, it would seem, must not be 
the appreciations of merely temporal and transient beings, 
but of some being that himself does not live in moments, 
as we mortals on earth do, but that appreciates in eter¬ 
nity, or that shares in such an eternal appreciation. 
“ Only that which never has been,” in our world of time, 
as Schiller tells us, “ that alone grows never old.” He is 
speaking of course of appreciable realities, not of physical 
ones. Or, again, the enduring appreciation may be con¬ 
ceived as belonging to an immortal soul, that survives the 
loveliness of all passing moments : — 

“ Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, 

A box where sweets compacted lie, 


894 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


My music shows ye have your closes, 

And all must die. 

“ Only a sweet and virtuous soul 
Like seasoned timber never gives ; 

But though the whole world turn to coal 
Then chiefly lives.” 

Or finally, a community of such free spirits might share 
together the lasting appreciation. But such eternal ap¬ 
preciation is confessedly, for us mortals, far too much an 
ideal. Whether we do in any measure partake of such 
an appreciative consciousness remains to be seen, and 
forms one of the deepest problems of constructive philoso¬ 
phy. For the moment, we have suggested to us, in this 
distinction between the outer reality which is describable, 
and the inner appreciation which is unreal, one tragedy of 
our finitude, namely, that our descriptive consciousness, 
coldly and dispassionately devoting itself to the typical, 
to the relatively universal structure of our experience, 
seems to seize upon what is for that very reason real, 
abiding, yes, like the numbers and the atoms, everlasting 
in time, while, on the other hand, that which makes the 
moment often so dear to us, its appreciable aspect, its 
value, is indescribable, and so essentially private and 
fleeting. This it is that makes science often so cold to 
us, and facts so lifeless, while the glowing world of appre¬ 
ciation appears to be, after all, so fantastic and vain; — 

" Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 

Und grim des Lebens goldener Baum.’ 

So far, however, we have come seeking for the conse¬ 
quences of our provisional definition of the essential 
nature of the outer order. We see now, plainer than at 
first, that the outer order as viewed by us men must be 
one of well-knit and universal law, structure, order, that 
it must be in definite forms, subject to categories, inde« 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


395 


pendent of momentary caprices. All this, as we begin to 
see, it must be in order to be describable. And describa- 
ble it must appear to us in order that the content of one 
intelligent moment of conscious life should be, under the 
conditions of our finite human existence, communicable to 
another. In short, the outer and natural order' is begin¬ 
ning to show itself in its complete character as a “World 
of Description,” that, as such, is bound to appear in our 
experience as a .world of permanence and of necessity. 
Forms and categories are necessary to description, and 
these mean order and fixity of type. 

On the other hand there may already appear, on the 
horizon of our discussion, the notion of another sort of 
conceivable reality, different from our natural order, but 
as possible in the logical sense as ours, namely, the real¬ 
ity of what we may call a World of Appreciation. For 
consider, were our human intercourse of another sort, 
were all the moments of all our human lives directly 
appreciable by us together and at our pleasure, — then 
the world of our accessible truth would have quite another 
aspect from that of the world of description. Conceive, 
namely, for the sake of argument, and as an ideal, of 
beings who were so aware of their common relations to 
the true Self that their life together was one of an inti¬ 
mate spiritual communion, so that the experience of each 
was an open book for all of them. In other words, con¬ 
ceive of beings who were mutually perfect mind-readers 
one of another. Their highest spiritual world would be 
for them what, in our finite bandage, our physical world 
of the outer order is not for us, a world of “ one undivided 
soul of many a soul.” The truth of it would be universal, 
without having to be first abstractly described. Or, to 
remind ourselves of what we learned in studying Hegel’s 
characteristic theory of universals, the community of 
truth, in the world of such spirits, would be rather of the 
Hegelian type of universality, than of the ordinary type 


396 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


of the more abstract universality. Forms and categories 
there would doubtless be in the experience of such beings, 
but the necessity for such forms would be of another 
kind. The experience of each individual would there be 
directly and organically related to the experience of all. 
It would n’t be necessary to put it into abstract shape 
before communicating it. Nor would the appreciative 
moment, once passed, be for each individual beyond recall, 
leaving this peopled earth a solitude wh^i it returned no 
more. For each spirit in that free world would read at 
pleasure his own past mind and experience as well as his 
neighbor’s, would not abstractly and discursively recon¬ 
struct, but would directly acknowledge the world of his 
whole inner and of his whole outer order, by virtue of 
the one organic and complete form of intercourse which 
would there exist. In such a world of spiritual inter¬ 
course, all the thoughts of one man would become directly 
the object of his neighbor’s thought. In such a case we 
should stand in the presence of an order in which the dis¬ 
tinction of outer and inner would be no ultimate one. All 
would be appreciable, spiritual, significant. But, as such 
appreciative mind-reading is under ordinary human con¬ 
ditions denied us, what we mean by having common 
objects, a common truth, and the same nature of things 
present to us all, is expressible only by saying that in so 
far as we can describe the contents of our moments of 
experience, and communicate these descriptions through 
imitative gestures, or through conventional speech, — so 
far and no further does our experience appear to us to 
represent the permanent, the outer, the objective. And 
hence, however the objective world may appear to freer 
spirits, or however it ultimately appears to the Self in his 
wholeness, to us it must appear, for the first, as a world of 
formed and well-categorized experience, that is, as a world 
of orderly universality. For only orderly universality is 
describable. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


397 


IY. 

I must beg you to glance back once more over tbe 
course of this necessarily intricate argument. We have 
been trying to define what is meant by the true and ob¬ 
jective, as distinct from the private and merely subjective 
elements of our human experience. We have provision¬ 
ally defined the physically real, for us men, as that which 
we experience and can describe. We have defined the 
business of natural science, therefore, as the description 
of the content of experience. We have formed a provi¬ 
sional notion of nature, as being “ the World of Descrip¬ 
tion.” As only that which has Form, Categories, Univer¬ 
sality, about it is describable, we have asserted already 
that this world of description must be a world of rigid 
necessity. 

On the other hand, however, we have suggested hypo¬ 
thetically what a “ World of Appreciation ” might be. It 
would be a world such as the organic Self in his whole¬ 
ness might have present to him at a glance, or such as 
the community of conceived spiritual mind-readers might 
share. It would be a world whose Universals were of 
the type that Hegel defined. It might be free from 
the type of necessity that our order of nature possesses. 
It might be a world altogether inspired by appreciative 
ideals ; and yet it would be a world of objective truth, for 
each individual in it, each conscious moment of it, would 
find the others as outer and yet not foreign facts. 

But now we must turn back from the hypothetical sug¬ 
gestion of that world of appreciation, whose reality we 
have yet by no means verified, and must study a little 
more closely the world of description, — the world, as we 
have seen, in which our actual human science moves. 

This world of empirical science suggests a well-known 
philosophical problem to which we must next refer. Sci¬ 
ence, as everybody knows, assumes that the physical world 


398 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


is one where the law of causation rules, where nature is 
uniform, and where, in general, what have been called 
axioms, namely, certain obvious and a priori principles, 
are valid. Now it is an old problem how empirical sci¬ 
ence comes by these a priori principles. You remember 
Hume’s doubts about the “ original of our idea of neces¬ 
sary connection.” You remember the controversy over 
the innate ideas. You remember Kant’s u Transcendental 
Deduction of the Categories.” Now in our day many stu¬ 
dents of the philosophy of science, following more or less 
unconsciously in the footsteps of Kant, have been more 
and more inclined to agree upon an account of the nature 
of these so-called “ axioms ” that I myself regard as un¬ 
questionably on the right track, although there is still 
much to be done in developing this view in all its details . 1 
According to this view the one postulate of physical sci¬ 
ence is that the real objects revealed to us in our experi¬ 
ence are describable in universal terms, and are so whether 
these objects are “ things ” or “ events.” In order to be 
describable, the things and the events must appear, to us 
men, in space and in time, because these forms of our ex¬ 
perience are actually the aspects of our conscious life that 
we have to use as the basis of every description. Fur¬ 
thermore, in order to make our description valid for all 
intelligent human beings, the fashions of our description 
have to be universal. We can’t describe the unique, e. < 7 ., 
Shelley’s “ sense that at the winds of spring,” etc. That 
we have to appreciate. Therefore it is n’t an object of 
scientific experience. Moreover, in order to describe, we 

1 The present is no place for a bibliography. I must refer to the 
now almost classic discussions in the introductory lecture of Kirch- 
hoff’s Vorlesungen iiber Mathematische Physik, in the Lectures and Es-> 
says of Clifford, vol. i. pp. 111-123, and in Mach’s Die Mechanik in 
Hirer Entwickelung, etc. See, for a popular suggestion of some re¬ 
lated views, the interesting book on Fundamental Problems , by Dr. 
Paul Carus. The present use of the word “description” I borrow 
from Kirchhoff, extending, however, his notion in my own way. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


399 

have to reduce the transient to the permanent. Other¬ 
wise the description would not be independent of the 
appreciative content of the moment. Hence we have to de¬ 
scribe in terms of assumed changeless things (e. g., atoms, 
elements, media, — in a word, substances). And in so far 
as the world of experience endlessly changes, we have to 
refer (1) these changes of experience to changes of space 
and time relations amongst the assumed substances, and 
(2) the ways of changing themselves, so far as possible, 
to universal laws. The axiom of the “ permanence of 
substance” has this very simple meaning, namely, that 
in so far as I can describe my experience to other men, 
who stand quite outside of this moment, there must be 
elements in the thing that is the object of this experi¬ 
ence which are quite independent of the particular time 
when I experienced the object itself. In fact, so far as 
anybody else, at any other time, could conceivably expe¬ 
rience this same thing, it must, ipso facto , be changeless. 
And unless anybody else you please could conceivably 
experience this same thing, either at the same time, or at 
any other time you please, the object is n’t public property, 
and I am doubtless in so far busied with my private ap¬ 
preciation. The changing elements in my experience of 
things may, however, themselves be described, in so far as 
they involve changes of relation amongst the permanent 
things that have been assumed to exist in space and time. 
For types of change must have permanent descriptions. 1 
From this point of view events too, as well as things, may 
be objects of scientific experience, i. e ., may be freed from 

1 The discovery of the exact meaning of this truth by Galileo and 
his contemporaries gave rise later to the Calculus, which is especially 
devoted to the mathematical description of the permanent types of 
change (cf. Newton’s name, Theory of Fluxions), and eventually has 
brought within the prospective range of exact science the vast world 
of “ sublunary ” changes, which ancient thought found almost hope¬ 
less, or only sought to appreciate in terms of ideals ; cf Lasswitz, 
Die Atomistik , vol. i. pp. 79-85 and 175-183. 


400 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the appreciative privacy of the momentary experience. 
The axiom of Causation is the axiom of the Describability 
of Events, in so far as they are real and public and are 
not merely events as privately appreciated. The axiom 
of the Uniformity of Nature is the axiom that the event 
once described, i. e ., reduced to an universal type, is de¬ 
scribed forever. Is that event one of a type that may be¬ 
come a possible object of anybody’s experience, — then it 
has universal and unchangeable characteristics. These 
constitute its law. Whoever experienced an event of the 
type, i. e ,, an event involving the same things in the same 
time and space relations, would observe in it these same 
characteristics. For otherwise there is something incom¬ 
municable, i. e., merely appreciable about the event. 

All these thoughts I have to suggest very dogmatically. 
Let a few brief illustrations indicate, not their proof, but 
their meaning. 

First then, all the so-called axioms of natural science 
relate to things and events in so far as they are describa- 
ble. There is notoriously no axiom as to the caprices of 
maidens, or as to the wayward human heart generally. 
The axioms of natural science are about number, space, 
time, motion, force (in the technical sense of the word), 
— all describable matters. 1 

In the second place our most assured and universal ax¬ 
ioms all relate to matters of the completest describability. 
I know that all beings, if only they can count, must find 
that three and two make five. Perhaps the angels can’t 
count; but if they can, this axiom is true for them. If I 
met an angel who declared that his experience had occa¬ 
sionally shown him a three and a two that did not make 
five, I should know at once what sort of an angel he was. 

1 Or about matters assumed to be describable. A deeper study 
than there is here room to undertake would show how limited our 
actual powers of description are. At the basis of every description, 
«. g. y of space, one finds a fundamental and irreducible appreciation. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


401 


But now why am I so sure of this ? Simply because my 
description of three and of two is so free from merely 
appreciative elements, because I know so perfectly their 
precise structure, and know that it is their structure, and 
is not any part of the appreciative content of the feelings 
of the moment when I count three and two. My feelings 
may be of what you will, of notes of music or of chalk- 
marks. I count; that is enough. The numbers as num¬ 
bers are producible and reproducible at my pleasure by my 
counting, and are not matters of my feelings. They are 
then indeed in my experience, but are not of the moment. 

Of geometrical axioms there is no time to speak at 
present. Let us pass immediately to more concrete in¬ 
stances. Take the ancient case of the principle that “ all 
men are mortal.” This is confessedly no axiom. It is an 
induction from experience. What is the reason why we 
are so sure of it ? If anybody, e. g ., the angel aforesaid, 
told us that in his experience there were cases of men 
who had lived a hundred thousand years, and who ap¬ 
peared to him to be essentially immortal, what should we 
reply ? If we thought already pretty highly of the angel 
in question, we might not respond according to our first 
impulse, but might reflect a little. If we did thus hesi¬ 
tate, what axiomatic answer to his assertion could we very 
soon suggest ? Very obviously this: That if this indeed 
were so, then the people that he called men must be in 
some fashion of a very different description from the peo¬ 
ple to whom we are accustomed to limit the name. That 
answer would express the scientific postulate very pre¬ 
cisely. If any man is a real man, and not a creature in 
a dream, then he must have some sort of public and defi¬ 
nite description, capable of being put into universal terms; 
and this description must be such as to follow him through 
all his fortunes to the end. The description will be one 
involving substances, and changes in the relations of these 
substances, the changes having a definable type. If this 


402 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


definable type of change is such as to involve some day 
the death of the man, — well then, anybody else who 
corresponds to this same description must also be doomed 
to death. That is the whole story of the universal mor¬ 
tality of man. That is all that we know about it, except 
indeed in so far as our knowledge of the description of 
the typical process of heredity enables us to say that the 
offspring of men must be describable as a man, and must 
therefore be as mortal as his fathers. 

To take another illustration : the Paul of Acts xxviii. 
2-6 gathered sticks to make a fire, and thereupon the 
viper came out of the heat, and stung him. The barba¬ 
rians, looking on, anticipated his death, and made appro¬ 
priate but rather narrowly appreciative comments. But 
“ he shook off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm.” 
So, “ after they had looked a great while and saw no 
harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said 
that he was a god.” The reasoning, granted the facts of 
the narrative, was crude, but not extraordinary. Evi¬ 
dently these barbarians used, after their fashion, the prin¬ 
ciple of the uniformity of nature. And what was this 
principle in their eyes ? It was the principle of the uni¬ 
versality and consequent permanence of descriptions. A 
man was described, according to their notion, as a being 
who, amongst other general characters, possessed that of 
swelling up and dropping down dead when stung by a 
viper. The description was inexact, but it served for 
lack of a better. Now Paul did not do this. He felt no 
harm. Well then, what followed? Not that one changed 
one’s description of a man, but that one looked for an¬ 
other class with another description, wherein to place 
Paul. Paul’s companions already had in mind a certain 
sub-class of men, described as apostles, who were, amongst 
other general characteristics, exempt from injury by the 
touch of “ deadly things.” To them, therefore, the class! 
fication as “ god ” was both superfluous and excluded. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


403 


The real axiom is then, that both things and events, in 
so far as they are objective, have universal and perma¬ 
nent descriptions, in whose unity all that is real concerning 
the events is so bound up that a given grouping of char¬ 
acteristics can be predicted for any object that corre¬ 
sponds to the given description. All prediction of natural 
events is therefore of necessity hypothetical. The sun 
will certainly rise to-morrow if in this part of the cosmos 
the same bodies keep moving in the present ways; and 
this they will do unless some describable physical cata¬ 
strophe (e. g ., the blowing into small fragments of the 
earth from some enormous internal tension) takes place 
before to-morrow; and this catastrophe, again, will not 
take place, unless describable physical changes are now 
going on in the earth and in the universe at large that are 
tending towards such an explosion, and tending in such 
manner as to lead to it before to-morrow. So one must 
always state one’s predictions. That the same causes lead 
to the same effects means, when interpreted in exact me¬ 
chanical terms, that certain definable motions, velocities, 
and accelerations of certain definite bodies are such, 
that when you describe them mathematically and exactly, 
you find certain earlier conditions of a system of bodies 
leading to and involving, as part of the whole description, 
certain later states. The belief that there is physical 
causation is then the belief that such mathematically ex¬ 
act descriptions of the things and events of the world are 
possible, whether we have found them as yet or not. And 
the genuine foundation of this belief is the observation 
that only by thus categorizing and formalizing our experi¬ 
ence do we find ourselves able to make its content public 
property, for our later thought, or for our neighbors. I 
must reconstruct my experience, or it is not publicly mine, 
is not universal, is not impersonal. And to reconstruct it 
I must lay stress upon so much of it as exemplifies forms 
and categories. 


404 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


One returns then, for the sake of characterizing this 
whole world of description, to the suggestion that the 
case of the rainbow already brought before us at the out¬ 
set. My neighbor experiences this or that. He says that 
this experience was not his alone, but was an experience 
of universal truth. Well then , we say, tell us what it 
was . In so far as he does this, with exactness, and under 
the conditions of scientific rigidity, he describes. If he 
describes successfully, he tells us, then, of definite and 
permanent things, in space and time, that behave in defi¬ 
nite and permanent ways. Does he fail of this rigidity of 
description (as our imperfect science is continually failing, 
in all but its mathematical departments), what is our con¬ 
clusion ? It is one that first voices itself thus: Then , as we 
say, you have not yet experienced enough of your object. 
Go back to it , and study it and its relations to other ob¬ 
jects until you have reached mathematical exactness. 
Does our observer now reply : — “ But I can’t reach such 
exactness, with any amount of study, because the object 
itself is n’t exact, conforms to no laws, behaves in no per¬ 
manent way, is n’t a lasting or a definite object ” ? — Then 
our final answer is: Ah, very well, if this be so, your 
object is n’t an object, but your private feeling. This 
Gewiihl von Erscheinungen we have heard of before from 
Kant. It is the very essence of the private and personal 
experience, uncategorized, incapable therefore of being 
shared by anybody else, and therefore not objective. 

So much then for a sketch of the world of description. 
So much for the gist of what I take to be the only possi¬ 
ble “ deduction of the categories ” of physical nature. 
Therefore is this our physical world one of rigid law, of 
immovable order, of atoms and ether vibrations and well- 
conserved energy. Therefore, moreover, is it an essen¬ 
tially human world, the world not of the fully conscious 
Self as such, in his eternal completeness, but of beings 
who never communicate with exactness through any de¬ 
vices but those of abstract description. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


405 


V. 

It hardly needs a very elaborate proof to show that 
this world of description as it has now at length been de¬ 
fined for us cannot be the whole of the real world. Our 
provisional assumption has indeed aided us thus far very 
well. It has defined for us the world of exact natural 
science, a world of boundless intellectual concern to us 
men, and surely a part or at all events an aspect of the 
real world. But our assumption has not pretended to be 
adequate to the account of one sort of outer reality, in 
which we all believe, and which we continually long to 
know. 

Here in my world of daily experience is my friend. 
In what sense is he real to me ? Very imperfectly I can 
describe him — a man of such height, so or so conditioned 
and habited as to this space form, wherein I find all the 
things of my world. Science teaches me to guess at a 
closer description of him. If one saw him through and 
through, as with my poor eyes I see him not, one would 
ultimately experience as the describable physical facts 
about him, — a quivering mass of molecules. I need not 
go further as to the constitution of these molecules. 
Enough, they would be flying about together, a swarm of 
trillions upon trillions, — restless with the pent-up energy 
of their unstable mutual positions, and with the live 
energy of their swift and ceaseless flight. Multitudes of 
them would be perpetually leaving, at every breath he 
draws, the form that I call his. Multitudes of new ones 
would take the place of what he had lost. Especially 
complex with intertwined spirals and streams of multitu¬ 
dinous molecules would be each of the many tens of mil¬ 
lions of cells of his brain. In this 44 system of systems,” 
like the astronomer in the boundless heavens, I the ob¬ 
server, were I acute enough to witness all this, would be 
lost. Thus my friend, however, might be found, as a fact 


406 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


in space and time, public before all men and angels in so 
far as they too were able to view him. Thus he might 
be found ? Nay, I have as yet found him not at all. 
I did not mean this maze of molecules by my friend. I 
meant his intelligence, which he more or less transmits to 
me through his own descriptive gestures and speech,— 
this and his appreciations themselves, which, as I have all 
along been saying, are his, and his alone, purely private 
facts of his inner life, but which, after all, I value most 
about him. His ideals, which I so admire, his will, which 
is often so much wiser than mine, his approval, which I 
prize so highly, — where are all these ? Are they for me 
facts in my world ? Yes, for I mean to speak of them. 
I think about them, and either they are real as I think 
them to be, or else, if I am in error, the true Self, who 
knows all things, is aware of what place in the true and 
absolute order the genuine object of my thoughts occu¬ 
pies, and knows what facts really constitute that to me in¬ 
accessible object. Facts they are for me ; and they are 
not facts within me ; nor yet are they describable facts in 
my space and in my time. The forms of my world con¬ 
tain them nowhere. The categories of my understanding 
cannot be impressed upon them. And yet they are real. 
They are in truth amongst the most vitally real objects of 
my faith, of my thinking, and of my will. 

What sort of reality then is this ? Is it not a most 
familiar kind of reality, in which our human social con¬ 
sciousness is absolutely bound up, without constant refer¬ 
ence to which we speak hardly a waking word ? And yet 
is it not a reality that as such absolutely transcends our 
private consciousness, and absolutely defies our powers of 
physical description ? 

And still all along, even in trying so resolutely to com 
fine the objective consciousness to the consciousness of 
whatever is describable, were we not meanwhile recogniz* 
ing and appealing to this objective other consciousness of 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


407 


our fellows ? Yes, we were; for we were speaking of what 
truth we could describe, and so share with the beings who 
possess this other consciousness. What we pretended to 
share, however, with them, was some abstraction or other, 
which in their experience we hoped that they could also 
realize. Their experience as such we never hoped to share. 
That was private, inner, incommunicable. What we 
could describe would be real for them only in case they 
too could experience what they could then abstractly 
describe in the same forms as those used by us. What 
was shared was then never consciousness, but only the 
imitative abstract and epitome of it, rendered cold and 
unappreciative, in order that it might the better be trans¬ 
ferred, through word and gesture, from our appreciative 
inner life to their foreign but equally warm and glowing 
world of feeling. Yet all along they were real for us and 
for one another. Their monad-like privacy, their window¬ 
less isolation of momentary consciousness, — we acknow¬ 
ledged its existence, and we pretended to intrude upon it 
with our descriptions of our own space and time world, 
descriptions which we asked them to verify. What could 
we be meaning by all this ? 

Our answer, as idealists, is already fully prepared and 
indicated. The reality that I attribute to my friend, the 
genuine external existence that (even while we defined the 
outer order as that which could be experienced and de¬ 
scribed) we all the while had to attribute to the appre¬ 
ciations of our fellows (which we can never, in our finite 
capacity, either experience or describe), — all this is unin¬ 
telligible except in so far as one recognizes that we seem¬ 
ingly isolated and momentary beings do share in the 
organic life of the one Self. I mean my friend’s inner 
life when I am fond of him. And yet my friend’s inner 
life is not one of my finite experiences at all; nor can it 
ever become so, however much I peer about for his mind 
in all my own world of space and of time; nor can I 


408 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


describe bow it mast seem to all beholders, as I describe 
the things of nature. What do I mean by him, then? 
Anything definite? Yes, a most definite, although not 
a physical fact. I mean a fact in the same conscious 
spiritual realm with me, a fact whose relation to me, as 
the true object of my thought, only the inclusive Self, 
in whose thought, for whose reflection, both my friend 
and I exist, — only he can know, and knowing can con¬ 
stitute. 

Neither my friend’s inner life, nor the human lives all 
about me whose experience I try to re-word in abstractly 
universal terms in my descriptive science, are themselves 
describable objects. They are, nevertheless, real; and so 
there is a sense in which, despite my limitations, I know 
myself as in a world of appreciation, a world whose facts 
are hard and fast, are beyond my private life, cannot be 
expressed in terms of my space and time, and yet must 
be present and united in the organic universality of the 
one Self. And I presupposed this world at every step, 
even while I spoke provisionally as if the objective and 
the describable were one and the same. The communion 
of spirits, then, is genuine, although we have no con¬ 
sciousness of a spiritual mind-reading of other finite 
beings. Our relations with the universe are essentially 
social. The world of description itself but expresses, in 
so far as it is the truth, one aspect of this fact of our 
spiritual intercourse. Because we can communicate with 
each other, therefore we can so far identify our descrip¬ 
tive accounts of our various inner experiences as to know 
that we have truth in common. But we could not even 
mean to communicate with each other, did we not presup¬ 
pose, as an objective fact, such organic spiritual relations 
as cannot possibly be expressed in any physical terms, but 
only in terms of the assertion that all the spirits are truty 
together in one Spirit. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


409 


VI. 

The facts of the world of appreciation have already 
forced us to alter in one respect our definition of the 
nature of this world. At the outset it was for us the 
world of essentially private appreciations, that is, of what 
we called feelings. In so far as we regard ourselves as 
beings bounded in time and space, the appreciative facts 
do indeed still retain this private and inner nature. But 
what we have now further found is the truth that the facts 
of this universe of appreciative feelings are not as iso¬ 
lated as at the outset they seemed to be, or as, in the 
world of space and of time, they must still seem. My 
friend yonder is, as fact of space and time, real to me 
only in so far as his inner life is foreign. But in so far 
as I truly communicate with him, we are members of the 
same world of appreciation; and in this sense he is real 
to me by virtue of our organic unity in the one Self. 
This organic unity, whereby the monads of the spiritual 
world cease to be merely monads, has already introduced 
that form of universality into the world of the apprecia¬ 
tions which we have just recognized. This world is one 
whose parts never become public property for one another, 
in so far as you observe them from without. Their ties 
are of another sort. They are “ windowless ” (as Leibnitz 
said of the Monads that in his doctrine made up the uni¬ 
verse of finite beings) ; but they are windowless only to 
one another’s finite view in the world of space and time 
relations. From above they are open to the light of the 
reflective Self, in whom they live and move and have their 
being. It is with their relations as it is already within 
our own finite lives, in so far as we are individual bits of 
the Self. For the moments of our lives are all separate 
in time, — isolated as the various finite selves are, yet 
in reflection we commune within ourselves, and catch in 
one moment the meaning of a thought that was only half 


410 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


articulate in another ; or correct, or otherwise review and 
reword the ideas that, left solely to time, would seem to 
be lost and dead forever. However small a bit of a self 
I am, I already, then, possess something of the inclusive 
transcendency of the true Self, for I “ look before and 
after,” and join in my one consciousness more of time 
than the mathematical instant would possess. And as the 
moments of my finite thought are to me when I reflect 
upon my own meaning, and upon the relations of many 
moments of my life, so my neighbors and I are to the 
larger Self when, discoursing together about the same 
objects, we find ourselves as it were but moments in his 
inclusive unity. 

The world of appreciation is, then, one of a sort of 
reflective “ publicity ” and interconnectedness ; and such 
an interconnection and publicity is, as we have* seen, the 
very presupposition of the existence of any genuine truth 
in the world of description. If I cannot really communi¬ 
cate with my neighbor, and think of meanings that are 
like his, there is no truth in any of our descriptions. 
Without the multitude of genuinely interrelated expe- 
riences, no true similarities, no describable universality 
of experience ; without the facts of appreciation, no laws 
of description ; without the cloud of witnesses, no ab¬ 
stract and epitome of the common truth to which they 
can bear witness. Destroy the organic and appreciable 
unity of the world of appreciative beings, and the de¬ 
scribable objects all vanish; atoms, brains, “ suns and 
milky ways ” are naught. On the other hand, if you 
destroy our describing kind of intercommunication, you 
can at least conceive of beings, as we did before, whose 
communications were of a direct and appreciative sort, as 
those of mother bird and nestlings now often seem to be 
as we look at them. The world of science, then, presup¬ 
poses the world of spiritual oneness ; the unity of the 
Self is through and through His Own, and is in so far 
appreciative. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


411 


Nor are all appreciations dumb. The whole Moral 
World presupposes a sharing of definite and express ap¬ 
preciations amongst moral beings , 1 a “ realization ” of the 
life of one by another. Describable phenomena may aid 
this mutual realization, but can never assure it; and only 
when it is assured does the moral life begin. What Kant 
called the Practical Reason, the moral nature of man, is 
through and through appreciative, but it is not on that 
account merely emotional. It is like the true Self, thor¬ 
oughly and reflectively rational. The moral law itself is 
in no physical sense an outer reality. You cannot describe 
its facts as you can those of gravitation, by looking on 
and computing; but none the less is the moral law a 
truth, — a truth, namely, of the universal appreciation of 
the world of finite ideals and strivings, all of them inner 
facts, but, in their totality, an universe of genuine objec¬ 
tivity. The world of appreciation is, then, the deeper 
reality. Its rival, the world of description, is the result 
of an essentially human and finite outlook. 

Not on that account, however, is the latter unreal. It 
is simply the way in which the world of appreciation, the 
world of the true and spiritual Self, must needs appear 
when viewed by a finite being zohose consciousness expe¬ 
riences in the forms of our space and of our time , and 
who is interested in giving to his fellows a dispassionate 
and universalized account of how he views it. Here is 
the permanent truth of Kant’s doctrine. 

But now, ere we pass to a closer study of the relations 
of these two aspects of reality, shall we not restate the 
modified view that we have gained of the nature of the 
world of appreciation ? As we now view it, it is the world 
whose categories are not those of abstractly formal de¬ 
scription, but are not the less true categories. They are 
the Categories of Self-Consciousness as such. When one 

1 See The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, chap vi. : The Moral In* 
sight, p. 131 sqq. 


412 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

is describing an object of physical science, he is so much 
concerned with the structure of this object, that it is his 
business to forget, as we say, himself, and to live solely 
in the process of constructive imitation whereby he seizes 
upon what is enduring about this object. When he appre¬ 
ciates, he says, on the contrary: So this thing is for me. 
Hence it was that, at the outset, appreciation appeared to 
us a sort of private exercise of each self-consciousness. It 
was, as we first found it, a sort of speaking with tongues, 
whereby each little bit of a self edified himself, but not 
the brethren. Now, however, we have learned a more 
excellent way. The truly objective and universal appre¬ 
ciation is like the Pauline charity. It is none the less 
self-conscious because it seeketh not its own, and rejoiceth 
rather in the truth. It stands for the unity of self-con¬ 
sciousness of the one Spirit, whom all finite things and 
experiences presuppose. His appreciations are indeed his 
own ; for he is alone and none beside him. Yet in them 
we all share, for that fact is what binds us together. 

Categories the universal appreciation has, and what are 
they ? They are the categories of the self-conscious and 
of the significant world, the categories of the realm of 
inter-related interests, and of the mutual dependence of 
each finite consciousness upon others for its own truth 
and. meaning. In this realm it is, too, that thoughts have 
objects beyond them and true relations to these objects. 
Here, also, the categories of objective worth and of pur¬ 
pose have validity; for it is self-consciousness that gives 
worth to things, and that reflectively compares the worth 
of things seen from one point of view with their worth as 
estimated otherwise. The world of appreciations is, then, 
the world of ideals. In space and in time you find no 
such things as worth and ideals; there you find only hard 
facts. The consciousness of us finite beings who know 
and judge the things of space and time is the source of 
the transient worth which appears to us here or there in 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


413 


our world. Only the eternal consciousness, in its time- 
transcending completeness, can know the really abiding 
and eternally true value of the world. 

On the other hand, the specific categories of the world 
of description have no application to this world of appre¬ 
ciation, in so far as it is regarded in itself. It is real, but 
there is no physical necessity in it, no natural causation 
links together its parts; and we know this, at present, 
because we have found what is the nature of physical 
necessity and of natural causation. In so far as two 
finite beings, A and B, separated in space and time, are 
to communicate with each other by abstract rewording of 
experience, they must find present in the experience 
of each of them a world of facts that submit to the cate* 
gories of science ; and of these one is that of physical 
necessity. But in so far as A considers what he means by 
the inner existence of B, he finds here a fact, to wit, an¬ 
other self-consciousness, recognized by him as real. This 
fact, however, is one that he cannot describe. He can 
describe the outward seeming of B, but never the inner 
appreciations of B as such. It is useless to say, therefore, 
that the category of physical causation applies to the true 
relations of B and A. A’s body, indeed, by virtue of its 
changes, causes changes in the body of B. So far physi¬ 
cal causation reigns supreme ; but A’s body and B’s body 
are describable phenomena in the world of space and time, 
and only describable phenomena have physical relations. 
A and B, however, are in their actual and appreciable 
relations by virtue of the part they both play in the inner 
self-consciousness of the organic and inclusive Self, who, 
being what he is, embodies his personality in numerous 
finite bits of selfhood, whereof A and B are examples. 
In him they are together, in so far as each of them thinks 
of the other. Another person of whom I think is, as 
such, not the cause, but the appreciable object of my 
thoughts. Where real things are in this relation, they 


414 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


are not in the describable relation called that of cause 
and effect. The spiritual world, as such, then, causes in 
me no thoughts. I think of it thus or thus by virtue of 
my place in its organic wholeness. The more of a self I 
am, the more and the deeper do I know its truth. And 
as a whole the world of the self is caused by nothing, is 
what it is by virtue of its own self-knowledge, is consti¬ 
tuted by the reflective self-consciousness in and for which 
it has its own being. It is, then, through and through, a 
world of Freedom ; its own significance is what occasions 
it thus to express itself. Nothing causes or explains it 
from without. It is its own excuse for being. 

As for the proof of all this, I can now only refer you 
again to the argument as to the nature of objective truth, 
and as to our relation thereto, that I so imperfectly set 
forth at the last time. Just this problematic but real 
relation of a thought to its object is the one implied in 
every least assertion of our lives. It is not true that we 
believe in outer objects because we suppose somehow, a 
priori, that our inner experiences must have adequate 
causes, and then make hypotheses as to the nature of 
these causes. On the contrary, unless I first believed in 
outer objects, and in the validity of my thoughts about 
them, I should never talk of laws and of causes at all . 1 
The objects of my thought are not the producers of my 
thought, but the truths that correspond thereto. A cup 
of coffee may, as I say, “ set me thinking,” that is, may 
increase the activity of my nerve-centres ; but what I 
think of may, then, be, not the coffee, but the feelings of 
my fellow-men, or the nature of things, or the prepara¬ 
tion of this lecture. The relation of object to thought 
is here, you see, not a physical, but a logically appreciable 
one, — one that only my relation to the inclusive Logos 
can explain or express. And this case is typical. Rela- 

1 A fuller exposition of these considerations will be found in the 
Religious Aspect of Philosophy , pp. 354-360. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


415 


tions of causation, however, exist amongst certain objects 
of thought, in a certain aspect of their nature. Is an 
object, namely, to be regarded by me in so far forth as it 
is abstractly describable, then, and only then, does it stand 
in causal relations to other objects. As for causes that 
affect me personally, these do so, once more, only in so far 
as I, too, am conceived, not in my inner and appreciable 
nature, but as myself capable of being looked upon and 
described from without, that is, as myself an object 
amongst objects, existent in space and time, and public to 
all men. “ The coffee sets me thinking: ” this expression 
refers to the physical fact of the essentially describable 
relation of a certain alkaloid to the physiological changes 
that its presence in my blood produces in my nerve cen¬ 
tres. Of this describable change in me as phenomenal 
thing my own inner life, after I drink coffee, is the appre¬ 
ciable aspect. 

VII. 

Our last word, “aspect,” suggests to us at once how 
near in one way we have now come to the language of the 
so-called “ Monism ” of recent times . 1 In fact, unsatis¬ 
factory as the “ mind-stuff ” theory seems to an idealist in 
the ordinary formulation of this theory, he has only to 
substitute his own interpretation of the fundamental truth 
of things for certain of the statements of Clifford and 
of the other Monists, and the doctrine of the “ Double 
Aspect” becomes at once luminous and inevitable. We 
shall aid ourselves greatly if we interpret the theory now 
in our hands by the aid of this monistic formula. In doing 
so we shall again survey, but from a new outlook, our 
whole argument. 

The true world is, to state our theory afresh, the system 
of the thoughts of the Logos. His unity, as we have seen, 
is a reflective, a self-conscious, and so an appreciable, but 
not, in its deepest truth, a describable unity. We know 
1 See above, Lecture IX., pp. 300-304. 


416 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


this unity just in so far forth as we ourselves consciously 
and rationally enter into it and form part of it. There¬ 
fore, in so far as we have inner unity of thinking, in so 
far as we commune with our fellows, and in so far as we 
rightly see significance in the outer universe, we are in 
and of the world of appreciation that embodies the 
thought of the Logos. 

On the other hand, once having recognized ourselves as 
finite beings, distinct from our fellows in so far as we are 
different centres of appreciative consciousness, and sun - 
dered from them in so far as we are all only bits of the 
true Self, we become aware of our private world of inner 
truth as distinguishable from the truth as experienced by 
other men, and from the universal truth of the all-know¬ 
ing world-consciousness. A new question then arises: — 
How much of this private truth of ours is a revelation 
to us in our finitude of what other finite selves can also 
know ? Then comes the answer: So much as can be de¬ 
scribed to these other finite selves and then, in their ex¬ 
perience, appreciatively verified , may be regarded as not 
our private content, but as universal. Herewith began a 
little while ago our effort to describe the content of our 
experience. Using the space and time forms, and the cate¬ 
gories of theoretical science, we get, as the result of a long- 
continued common effort of humanity at describing things, 
the world of science. But again the question returns 
upon us, In what sense is this world of description real ? 
The only answer is, It is real in so far as it is in very 
truth an aspect of the world of the Logos, such an aspect, 
namely, as can be expressed by finite consciousness in 
terms of the space and time forms, and of the categories 
of empirical science. Only as such an aspect has the 
physical world a reality. Consequently all its laws, all 
its necessity, its causation, its uniformity, belong, not to 
its inner nature as such, but to the external show of this 
nature. If we could grasp the whole truth at a glance, 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


417 


as the Logos does, we should see what now is dark to us, 
namely, why and how the world of appreciation, when 
viewed under the conditions of our finite experience, has 
thus to seem a world of matter in motion. As it is, how¬ 
ever, we already know that the world of matter in motion 
is simply an external aspect of the true and appreciable 
world. That is, in substance, the whole of our philosophi¬ 
cal insight into the matter. Therefore it is perfectly true 
to say that my friend’s brain, with its countless molecules, 
is simply the outward aspect of my friend’s inaccessible 
inner life, in so far as this life is expressed, symbolized, 
translated, into the language of my personal experience 
of time and space phenomena. My friend, as he is in him¬ 
self, is therefore not a new sort of thing, called a soul or 
mind, existent somewhere yonder in space, in amongst his 
brain molecules, — a thing imprisoned in his body. No, 
he is himself the reality that, when I look at his body, I 
am vainly trying to see and describe. What I see and 
describe is simply the physical, the phenomenal aspect of 
his inner and appreciative life. That he does appear at 
all in my world of phenomena is due to .the fact, not fur¬ 
ther explicable from the human point of view, that he and 
I, by virtue of our places in the world-order, have spirit¬ 
ual relations, think of each other, and do somehow indi¬ 
rectly commune together. That this relation of his inner 
life to me is symbolized by the describable facts of his 
physical organism, is due in general to my nature as a 
being who can perceive and describe only what appears 
to me in space and in time. That just this particular set 
of facts, however, should symbolize to me his inaccessible 
inner life, is once more, for us human beings, an ultimate 
datum. The Logos knows, not we, why inner feelings, 
outwardly symbolized in space and time to our percep¬ 
tions, should appear as nerve-centres made up of countless 
flying molecules. The twofold aspect itself is, however, 
a certain truth of our experience. There is my friend. 


418 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

He is for himself conscious, i. e., appreciative. The only 
aspect of this appreciative life that can become manifest 
to me actually appears to me as matter in motion. And 
this is describable. Herewith we have however only the 
fact of the double aspect. The inner intelligibility of 
this fact is regarded by us as something that must be un¬ 
derstood by the Logos. It is for us a problem ; but is 
not so for our true Self, who completes the insight that 
for us is so fragmentary. 

Our theory, then, does not declare, as do other forms of 
the double aspect theory, that there is a curious kind of 
substance in the world, a substance mysterious and essen¬ 
tially inscrutable, that has the two aspects, the mental 
and the physical. For our theory undertakes to know 
what this substance is. It is the conscious life of the 
Logos, whereof my friend is a finite instance, and whereby 
I too am so conceived as to be in appreciable relations to 
him. Nor yet do we say, as the mind-stuff theory says, 
that my friend is a mass of mind-stuff atoms, which pro¬ 
duce effects upon my mass of mind-stuff atoms. On the 
contrary, for our theory, my true friend stands in relations 
to me that are essentially appreciable, not physical at all. 
He causes no effects in me whatever. His body affects 
my body; but that is an affair of physics, not of inner life. 
I am genuinely related to him in so far only as the insight 
of the Logos reflectively so constitutes our mutual concern 
for each other that, as a fact, it is what it is. My friend 
then is no cause in the world of physical phenomena, at 
all. He is neither matter nor energy. His thoughts 
move no molecules. His feelings towards me innervate 
no muscles, set in motion no bodily limbs, release no phy¬ 
sical energy. But his organism, as it appears in space and 
time, is the describable show and symbol of the inner and 
appreciable reality that is his ; and, even so, the physical 
effects that his organism produces upon mine are merely 
the describable show of our spiritual and appreciable inter* 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


419 


relationships. His matter and energy, his nervous tre¬ 
mors and his innervated muscles, his deeds and their phy¬ 
sical effects are the phenomenal aspect of his part of the 
world-order. His mind does not influence his body. His 
body is merely a very imperfect translation of his mind 
into the describable language of space. The physical 
causation that I attribute to him should be attributed, 
therefore, solely to this body. For all physical causation 
is only the describable translation of the inner meaning of 
things into terms of relations amongst bodies. The rela¬ 
tions of the world of appreciation, which is the true world, 
to the world of description, which is its show, are there¬ 
fore themselves in no wise relations of cause and effect. 
I as observer, interpreting the true world in terms of our 
human forms and the categories of theoretical science, am 
bound to see, in the world as thus interpreted, rigid laws 
of causation. But the laws thus seen are symbols of 
deeper truth, and not the physical effects of this truth. 
This deeper truth itself is not causal. It is only such 
truth as, in order to be describable, must show the aspect 
that the laws of causal connection in our experience inter¬ 
pret in their own imperfect way. 

VIII. 

Three further and closing considerations occur to us, in 
this connection, as giving fuller expression to our form 
of the doctrine of the “double aspect.” The first of 
these is suggested by the problem of the relation of the 
inorganic world to our human consciousness. The second 
is suggested by the problem of the real nature of physical 
evolution. The third has to do with the problem of the 
freedom of the will. 

The theory of the “double aspect,” applied to the facts 
of the inorganic world, suggests at once that they, too, in 
so far as they are real, must possess their own inner and 
appreciable aspect. Upon this suggestion we have no 


420 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


time to dwell at great length. In general it is an obvious 
corollary of all that we have been saying. 

When I think of the stars and of matter, of space and 
of the energy that appears forever to be dissipating itself 
therein, I think of something real, or else of merely a pri¬ 
vate experience of mine. If, now, the common experience 
of humanity is our sufficient warrant for assuming some 
universal reality as actually embodied in these hot stars 
and cold interspaces, of what sort must this reality be ? 
In and for itself, we now answer, it must be an appre¬ 
ciable reality, the expression of what, in Schopenhauer’s 
sense of the word, may be called a World-Will; as well 
as of what, in Hegel’s sense, may be called an Universal 
Self-Conscious Thought. But to say this is not to commit 
ourselves to the acceptance of those paradoxes of the seem¬ 
ing outer order which we set forth in our tenth lecture. 
These paradoxes were due to the assumption of infinite 
space and time as themselves outer and real, and to their 
introduction into our account of the physical processes of 
the stellar world. We now have reached a deeper insight. 
The “ antinomies ” of the physical order no longer terrify 
us. They are due to our trying to express the whole 
appreciable system of things in our human forms of space 
and time. Here before us is the order of the embodied 
Logos. We try to describe it. Our science undertakes 
the task ; our highest descriptive synthesis encounters in¬ 
congruities. What do these mean ? They mean simply 
that our descriptive science is, indeed, in one aspect of its 
work, playing with “ pebbles on the beach.” For the 
fashion of this world of space and time is such as to 
give us no united and intelligible definition of the world- 
process in its wholeness. Only the self-completed is in¬ 
telligible ; and our physical world in endless time and 
in infinite space, being no world of self-completed, that is, 
of “ cyclical ” processes, is a mere aspect of the true world, 
and is also an aspect that must be but fragmentary. 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


421 


Higher beings than we may have other forms of descrip¬ 
tive science, based upon a consciousness, say, of some other 
form of space and time, e. g ., of a “ non-Euclidean ” 
space of three dimensions, or of a space of four or more 
dimensions, and of a time that includes the truth of ours, 
and that still makes clear how the world-process somehow 
returns into itself. Such higher forms of consciousness 
we can speculatively view as possibilities. They may be 
adequate to a description of the whole world of pheno¬ 
mena as viewed by such higher beings. We, however, in 
our limitation, know only that the Self must have unity 
in himself, — an appreciable wholeness in his conception 
of the world. We speak of him as infinite; we do not 
mean that he is vaguely infinite, so that however much 
of his thought one might consider there would always be 
more to consider. On the contrary, he knows himself as 
one, and so as eternally complete, — as a finished whole. 
Otherwise he would be no self. Therefore our vague in¬ 
finities of space and time, never finished, never explor- 
able as wholes, are very poor embodiments of his truth. 
His infinity, however it is constituted, must mean self¬ 
completion. We may expect, therefore, so soon as we 
approach the limits of our science about the phenomenal 
things in space and time, to get warnings that our descrip¬ 
tive knowledge is an inadequate translation of the truth. 
Such a warning we got in the study of the outer order a 
little while since. The world of the stars, then, and of 
the “ running down ” energy is not really what it seems. 
It is a “ well-founded phenomenon,” but not a final truth. 

On the other hand, we have, indeed, a perfect right 
thus to say that the world of the stars is, like the brains 
of our friends, the well-founded show in space and time 
of an appreciative consciousness, and that the unity of the 
laws of physical nature is the outer aspect of some deep 
spiritual unity of will and plan in the world. We have a 
right to interpret this unity, in hypothetical forms, as well 


422 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


as we are able. Only we must not say that this will and 
plan are in any physical sense the causes of our show- 
world. On the contrary, all physical causation is itself 
part of the show, in so far as the show is describable. 
They are perfectly right, therefore, who deny designs as 
factors in natural processes. The true World-Will, being 
no phenomenon in space and time, is no form of physical 
energy, and moves no matter. The laws of matter more 
or less completely portray, but do not, physically speak¬ 
ing, result from the Logos. No creative fiat produced the 
world at any moment in past time. To say that would be 
to assert the existence somewhere in time of an utterly 
indescribable event, which is precisely what nobody can 
assert of the world of time, since this world is nothing 
unless in so far as it is describable. For the same 
reason no will, infinite or finite, ever, by any temporal 
interference, turned aside a single atom in its flight. 
The physical world shows us, indeed, a plan, but only in 
so far as the space and time phenomena symbolize and 
very poorly translate an unity, that, as it is in itself, is an 
unity of will, of self-consciousness, of a divine interest in 
truth, of an equally divine self-possession, of an eternal 
rest in the fullness of perfected being. In this will, the 
finite wills themselves share, and of it they are a part, 
since this unity includes, knows, and justifies the organ¬ 
ized relationships of the whole universe of finite apprecia¬ 
tions. The physical world, then, expresses such a world- 
will, but is not subject to the interference of this will. 

Turning to the other aspect of the natural order — to 
the aspect in which this seems to be a world of evolution, 
— we now see something of what that point of view also 
means. The world is for us human observers a world 
that contains processes of evolution, in so far as, in this 
or that portion of it, we detect temporal series of pheno¬ 
mena that are not merely describable, but that, regarded as 
wholes, suggest to us something significant, — a tale, an 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


423 

appreciable form of some lengthy sequence, — an ideal 
realized, a bit of a plan embodied. The first question of a 
philosophy of evolution is, Have we a right thus to look 
for the suggestion of plans symbolized by the most rigid 
and necessary causal sequences of nature ? The answer 
is, Certainly. For, as we now see, all describable truth is 
an outward symbol of an appreciable truth. Of this one 
central principle our doctrine of the Logos assures us; and 
to look for a plan embodied in a physical sequence is not 
to look for a designing Daemon in nature, interfering 
with rigid causation. On the contrary, thus to look is 
simply to watch for signs and hints of the appreciable 
aspect that, as we already know, is there. To believe 
that my friend lives as a conscious being, is not to doubt 
that in the physical world his only representative is a 
nervous mechanism, whose physiological processes are as 
rigidly necessary and purely material as the flight of a 
planet or the fall of a stone. My friend’s physical life is, 
indeed, merely a series of reflexes, with which his will 
never interferes, any more than the concave side of the 
curve interferes with the convex. Regarded physiologi¬ 
cally, his consciousness is a superfluous extra accompani¬ 
ment, or as it has been called, an “ epiphenomenon,” that 
does nothing with his brain-molecules, but merely runs 
parallel to them ; but regarded more deeply, his will, his 
appreciative inner life, is really his bit of the truth of the 
Logos, and is the only real truth present. It is the physi¬ 
ological view, after all, that has to do only with seemings. 
His brain is the phenomenal outer aspect of this deeper 
truth. Well, even so in nature the truth present is once 
more the mind of the Logos. Of this mind the laws of 
matter are the show. When we search for a hint of the 
significance of things, we do not doubt the absolute valid¬ 
ity and unchangeableness of physical laws in their own 
sphere. We look for signs of the truth that is behind 
them, interfering not with them, but speaking through 


424 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

the mask of them. Such signs appear to us as processes 
of evolution. As I often misread my friend’s mind, so 
every such interpretation of nature’s facts is tentative, 
and may be wrong. In this sphere we can but guess. 

We have, however, now mentioned a somewhat novel 
contrast between our descriptive and our appreciative atti¬ 
tude towards a temporal series of events, a contrast at 
which it is necessary still to glance a moment. When, 
namely, I physically describe, that is, explain events by 
their causes, I first seize upon some one instant of time, 
some one event, and ask: What is the configuration of the 
world now f Having found in a measure this descrip¬ 
tion of one moment of the world, this cross section of the 
temporal series of events, I ask myself: How did this 
condition result from the previous state of the world ? 
Descriptively, or contemplatively, then, I study the world 
from one moment to another. But when I view a physi¬ 
cal series appreciatively, when I estimate the world, or 
any part of it, say a kind action, or the inner life of my 
friend, or a process of evolution, I don’t thus dwell on the 
momentary description or configuration of things, but I, 
as it were, take in at one glance a whole series of mo¬ 
ments. I treat some portion of the world as a story. I 
look before and after nntil I have grasped the whole of it. 
So (to take a case that already illustrates our attitude 
towards all evolution), as I follow a melody, I don’t dwell 
so much on the single note, but on the whole sequence, 
and on the sequence as a whole. Or, once more, to esti¬ 
mate such an act as that of the good Samaritan in the 
parable is not to study his single attitudes, as configura¬ 
tions of the molecules of his body. Now indeed he 
comes, now he stops, now he kneels, now he rises. And 
all. these conditions might be causally explained as a 
series of described configurations of his molecules. But 
not thus does one estimate the good Samaritan ideally. 
One rather looks at the whole story of his deed as one 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


425 


whole story, just as one considers a melody, or a progres¬ 
sion of chords, or a drama, or any such sequence of 
events. 

To appreciate the world in historical terms, then, to 
find processes of evolution in it, we must in some mea¬ 
sure forsake the purely temporal and limited point of view 
to which we naturally find ourselves confined, and to which 
every scientific explanation of nature is always confined. 
To appreciate even hypothetically the meaning of a pro¬ 
cess in time, we must in some measure transcend time. 
And this once more suggests how the ideal interests that 
the processes of nature seem to serve wherever we find evo¬ 
lution cannot themselves be viewed as physical factors in 
these processes. An evolution is a series of events that 
in itself as series is purely physical, — a set of necessary 
occurrences in the world of space and time. An egg de¬ 
velops into a chick; a poet grows up from infancy; a 
nation emerges from barbarism ; a planet condenses from 
the fluid state, and develops the life that for millions of 
years makes it so wondrous a place. Look upon all these 
things descriptively, and you shall see nothing but matter 
moving instant after instant, each instant containing in its 
full description the necessity of passing over into the next. 
Nowhere will there be, for descriptive science, any genuine 
novelty or any discontinuity admissible. But look at the 
whole appreciatively, historically, synthetically, as a musi¬ 
cian listens to a symphony, as a spectator watches a drama. 
Now you shall seem to have seen, in phenomenal form, a 
story. Passionate interests will have been realized. The 
will of the growing animal, the ideals of the poet, the his¬ 
tory of the evolving races, these will have passed before 
you. In taking such a view are you likely to be coming 
nearer to the inner truth of things ? Yes ; for the con¬ 
sciousness of the Logos must be one that essentially tran¬ 
scends our own natural time-limitations; and in so far as 
we view sequences in their wholeness, we are therefore 


426 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


likely to be approaching the unity of his world-possessing 
insight. In doing all this, however, we are not learning 
how ideals have interfered with nature’s mechanism, but 
how nature’s mechanism, in its temporal sequences, sym¬ 
bolizes, as it must, a world of ideals. The student of evo¬ 
lution finds the world mechanical, because he is watching 
describable processes. But he finds the world also teleo¬ 
logical, because he is viewing not merely the sequences 
as such, but the wholes of sequence ; is listening not merely 
for the notes of nature’s music (the passing events of in¬ 
stant after instant), but for the melody (the appreciable 
total of the life that is made up of many successive in¬ 
stants). And as the appreciable is deeper and truer than 
the describable, as the insight into the whole of what we 
mortals call time is logically prior, in the unity of the 
eternal Logos, to the isolation of our own finite lives, so 
the student of evolution, in thus viewing the world of his¬ 
tory, the world of interests that in the world of appre¬ 
ciation contend for the mastery, of ideals that long for 
realization, is coming nearer to the truth of things than 
is he who merely describes the necessary sequence of 
time. It is true that every such interpretation of nature 
is fragmentary and hypothetical; since we dwell not at 
the centre of the truth of the Logos, but in our finite iso¬ 
lation of half-conscious temporal insights. It is also true 
that every interpretation which I make of my friend’s in¬ 
ner life is fragmentary and hypothetical. It is neverthe¬ 
less true that in both cases interpretation in appreciative 
terms is deeper than mere description of phenomena, and 
is more likely to get at the truth of things. 

And now, surely, we may see how vain are the anxi¬ 
eties of those who wonder how conscious life could ever 
have been evolved on our planet under purely physical 
conditions, and what will become of all such life when 
the energy of the stars runs down. For at the present 
stage of our argument we know that there is no real 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


427 


process of nature that must not have, known or unknown 
to us, its inner, its appreciable aspect. Otherwise it could 
not be real; since in so far as it is merely describable, it 
is also merely show, is merely abstract, like the numbers 
and the geometrical figures, and has no true fullness of 
being . 1 The difference between living and inanimate na¬ 
ture is for us now merely the difference between the na¬ 
ture that like the face of a friend is near enough to our 
own for us to get a sympathetic suggestion of what ap¬ 
preciative truth it probably embodies, and the nature that 
like the infinitely complex ether waves which fill the inter¬ 
planetary spaces is too remote from our own to be appre¬ 
ciable from our point of view. But the power of nature 
to embody divine appreciations is not in this fashion lim¬ 
ited. Even so, processes of evolution are for us such 
series of events as are near enough to our human interests 
to suggest their probable interpretation as stories. And 
so what we call life appeared on our globe as soon as na¬ 
ture’s products were such as can at present come within 
the range of our appreciative insight. The 44 miracle ” 
of the beginning of life is merely the subjective miracle 
of our own human point of view. Beyond that beginning 
we have no appreciative insight. This side of it we have. 
The 44 discontinuity ” exists in us, not in the truth. 

“ Animism,” to be sure, the tendency that we formerly 
also called 44 anthropomorphism,” the tendency by mere 
analogy to endow stones or planets with a quasi-human 
life, remains a misleading tendency. For it is not ours 
to speculate what appreciative inner life is hidden be¬ 
hind the describable but seemingly lifeless things of the 
world. But what we know is that it must be what it is 
in so far as the self-consciousness of the Logos finds a 
place for it; and this place must be, like that of our own 
finite consciousness, a place in the world of appreciation. 
The rest is to us mortals as yet wholly unknown. But this 
1 Or, as Hegel would say, WirJclichkeit. 


428 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


consideration sets aside tlie anxious question as to the rise 
of consciousness in general. The world has always had 
its appreciable aspect. We mortals ourselves stand on the 
shore of this boundless world of appreciation, and describ¬ 
ing this or that pebble, or looking at this or that breaking 
wave, seem to understand a little of their meaning. We 
know that the whole limitless ocean is full of an infinite 
meaning, since otherwise its throbbing billows and innu¬ 
merable currents, its depths and unexplored solitudes, its 
resistless tides and its divinely mighty storms, would not 
be real. If we ask what this meaning is, we see again 
only wave after wave approaching, curving, gleaming, 
and breaking on the beach; and we hear only the eter¬ 
nal thunder of this restless life. Each new wave we men 
call a process of evolution. The world of what appears 
to us as endless time seems in our neighborhood to be 
filled with such processes. And herewith our empirical 
knowledge ends. Do we doubt whether there is truth 
and clear insight behind all this imperfect experience of 
ours ? The very question, as we have already seen, in¬ 
volves its own answer. The problem can exist only as 
transcended by the insight of the Solver of problems. 


IX. 

The third and last of our concluding considerations 
relates to the problem of freedom. 

If one asks as to the world of appreciation in its whole¬ 
ness, What efficient power caused it to exist? the ques¬ 
tion is for the first meaningless. For cause, as usually 
understood, relates to the world of description, and to the 
explanation of temporal sequences. The only cause that 
you can seek in the world of appreciation is in a very dif¬ 
ferent sense a cause. It is, namely, a justification for this as 
against any other fashion of will and of self-consciousness. 
The world in its wholeness appears to us in space and 
time as a describable system of phenomena, bound together 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


429 


by rigid law. That, however, just this system of phe¬ 
nomena, these atoms, these physical laws, this order of 
nature should be there, rather than some other equally 
describable system, with other atoms and other types of 
motion, — this seems to us the mere fact, the gigantic ca¬ 
price of nature. Viewing this same caprice in its other 
aspect, namely, as a system of appreciable truth and of 
the inner ideals of the Logos, we do not indeed get rid of 
the aspect of what Hegel called UnmittelbarJceit or “ im¬ 
mediacy ” about the world. It is what it is. So the 
Logos, from eternity, and in one organic all-embracing 
act, constitutes his system of appreciative truth. If we 
still ask why ? we must answer, not with Schopenhauer, 
“ For no reason,” but with all the rational idealists, 
“ Freely, and solely for the reason most pleasing to him¬ 
self, but not without reason.” For such is the necessary 
consequence of the conception of an untrammeled and 
fully self-possessed Self, who solves all his own problems, 
including the problem, Why this eternal choice? The 
element of caprice is there, in so far as none but the Self 
can fathom his own will. The World-Will is so far like a 
fair maiden, “ in her silence eloquent,” who chooses be¬ 
cause such is her choice. Yet the caprice is, in the case 
of the completely self-conscious Will, a necessary element 
of its reason. The highest Reason has no reason beyond 
it, and in so far it is capricious. But it includes all 
lower reasons, and all finite points of view, and so as 
against them is infinitely less capricious, in the baser 
sense of the word, than they, since they are infinitely less 
aware of their own meaning 5 and it lacks their blindness. 

It is for this reason that we have called the world of 
appreciation one of freedom. But how are our finite 
wills related to this freedom? Are we predestined to 
our place in the world-order? Are we “impotent pieces 
of the game he plays ? ” The answer, as I conceive, is 
this: In so far as we are clearly conscious of our own 


430 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


choices, we ourselves are part of the world of apprecia¬ 
tion. We are then, ourselves, conscious bits of the Self. 
Our wills are part of his freedom. And hereby we too are 
free. Only in so far, however, as we are not conscious of 
our choices, but only find in ourselves blind and uncon¬ 
scious impulses, mere facts of hereditary temperament, or 
of momentary mood, we do not enter into his freedom. 
Some one else, we know not who, some ancestor, some 
good or evil angel, may then have chosen these things for 
us, not we. But our conscious volition is a fragment of 
the freedom of the World-Will. 

But how, one may ask, can I be in any sense thus free ? 
After all, is not my consciousness, viewed as a fact in 
time, tied hopelessly to this describable nervous mechanism 
of mine ? The world, in its divinely free capriciousness, 
involves a physical order that necessarily contains just 
this organism. What the organism itself will do in given 
circumstances, is therefore physiologically determined by 
the whole order of nature and by the whole of past time. 
And my will moves no atom of this mechanism aside from 
its predestined course. And yet I, whose will is just 
so much of the world of appreciation as constitutes the 
inner aspect of this describable mechanism, — I shall in 
some sense be free ? How explain such a paradox ? 

In answer I appeal afresh to that double aspect which 
the world of time has already presented to us as we spoke 
of the facts of evolution. Whatever the true facts about 
what we call time may be, as they are known to the Self, 
we are sure that the order of nature, from what we are 
obliged to call the infinite past to the infinite future, just 
because it does all of it express one law, just because it 
must all be absolutely foreknown, is present in one time- 
transcending instant to the insight of the Logos. It is 
present, I insist, because it is all one truth, and because 
the infinite Self is there to know all truth. But how all 
the world of time can and must thus form to the infinite 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


431 


Self a single instant of time-transcending knowledge is 
after all not so very hard to conceive, at least in general. 
You all tlie while, in your finite capacity, in so far as you 
are self-conscious, c?o transcend time, yes, you yourself. 
A sequence of chords is not a mere series of events to you, 
whose earlier moments are non-existent when the later are 
there. The whole series is one artistic moment to you. 
Reflection continually transcends time. Your life is a 
“looking before and after.” This time-transcendence 
bears precisely the relation to the single events of your 
life that consciousness in general bears to your brain- 
states. This transcending of a time-series, and estimat¬ 
ing it as one whole, is in fact what one might call the soul 
of the natural order. For the ideal or appreciable order 
is thus in fact linked to the natural order precisely as mind 
in the finite sense is linked to body. Without time to re¬ 
flect upon and transcend, there would indeed be no finite 
consciousness of an ideal or appreciable value in things. 
But this consciousness of the appreciable aspect of the 
events of time views the temporal world as the musical 
hearer views the whole symphony, seeing the end in the 
beginning, and the beginning in the end, not explaining, 
not describing in causal terms, but making an appreciable 
synthesis of time in one glance. 

This being the case, our own consciousness, at a moment 
of choice, is itself twofold. Our organism passes through 
a series of states, constituting what we call an act. This 
act fills up a considerable time. Of the successive states 
we are aware. So far we ourselves live in time, and fol¬ 
low the series, perceiving nothing but what must be de- 
scribable and necessary. On the other hand, if we are 
truly self-conscious, we are aware of some significance, of 
some ideal value, in the series of states as a whole. The 
melody (to return to that figure) — the melody of con¬ 
duct interests us, far more than the notes of our momen¬ 
tary physical reaction. But in just so far we actually 


432 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


seem to ourselves to be choosing the conduct as such, since 
we are approving this whole series of physical events. On 
this side of our twofold consciousness, then, we are all the 
while truly transcending time, yes, are taking hold upon 
and forming spiritually part of that absolutely time-tran¬ 
scending appreciation that the Self possesses in view of 
the whole physical order. Such an inclusive moment of 
conscious choice, in fact, does possess in one act a past 
and a future, does estimate whole series of events, and, 
although, in its finite capacity, it is dependent on a brain 
state, still, in its significance, in this its ideal comment, it 
takes hold upon the distant in time. Such consciousness, 
therefore, being always a time-transcending estimate of 
physical series as wholes, may be indeed dependent on 
brain-states, but in significance it is already, in its mea¬ 
sure, a part of the eternal world-estimate, which, as we 
have learned, is a far deeper reality than the world of phy¬ 
sical nature itself, and as a whole is no event in time at 
all, but a transcendent spiritual estimate of all time. 

But if you have followed me thus far into this rather 
breathless region of speculation you may now finally ask, 
“ But does all this make us morally free ? ” I answer, 
in a very profound sense, it does. For gather once more 
into one the threads of our argument. The Self, we say, 
regards its world in a twofold way: (1) As a time series 
of events in which the earlier events fatally cause the 
later; (2) As an eternally complete world total, whose 
significance it ideally estimates and chooses. And we, in 
so far as we are morally judging beings, in so far as we 
too make ideal estimates, are a part of the Self in this 
second sense, living not merely in time, but also above 
time, beyond time. In so far as we are temporal facts, 
we are indeed mere descendants of an animal ancestry, 
mere creatures of nerves. But we are far more than tem¬ 
poral. And now remember: this temporal order, rigid 
and necessary in itself, is it not after all only one of infi- 


PHYSICAL LAW AND FREEDOM. 


433 


nitely numerous possible world-orders, any one of which 
could be conceived by the Self, but all of which, from the 
eternal point of view, are deliberately left unconceived, 
unreal, because of the ideal estimate which the Self makes 
in choosing this world ? What then, though we are bound 
in the temporal world, may we not indeed be free, — yes, 
and in a non-temporal and transcendent sense effective too 
in the eternal world ? May we not in fact, as parts of an 
eternal order, be choosing not indeed this or that thing in 
tim6, but helping to choose out and out what world this 
fatal temporal world shall eternally be and have beenl 
This, as some of you know, was Kant’s famous doctrine 
of what he called the transcendental or extra-temporal 
freedom and the temporal necessity of all our actions. 
From this point of view, as you may already in part see, 
the natural and the spiritual orders, the physical and the 
moral orders, the divine and the human, the fatal and 
the free, may be finally reconciled. If this be so, then 
indeed we shall no longer fear fate, no longer dread the 
facts of nervous physiology, no longer be appalled by na¬ 
ture, no longer appeal to temporal miracles to save the 
ideals. God and Caesar will indeed become reconciled. 
Is such an hypothesis after all impossible ? I think not. 
I hold it rather to be the deepest truth. 

But all this, I once more admit, must still seem, when 
thus presented, very unpersuasive. The limits of a rela¬ 
tively untechnical discussion permit as I thus close only 
this dim suggestion of one of the deepest insights of 
modern philosophy. If it is right, your acts are at once 
from the temporal point of view absolutely bound, and 
from the eternal point of view absolutely free. For you 
enter into the divine order in two ways. In this world 
you are a fact in time, descended from the animals, a 
creature with just this brain, doomed for countless ages 
to precisely this conduct. But the whole temporal order 
is for the absolute Self, of whom you are a part, only 


434 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


one way of looking at truth. All eternity is before 
him at a glance. He has chosen not temporally, but in 
an act above all time, yet an act in which you yourself 
share, to conceive this world which contains you. He has 
chosen this world for the sake of its worth. And in the 
estimate that eternally chooses, your will, your time-tran¬ 
scending personality, your consciousness has its part also. 
You are not morally free to change laws in this world. 
But you are moral and free because you are in the eter¬ 
nal sense a part of the eternal World-Creator, who never 
made the world at any moment of time, but whose choice 
of this describable world of time in its wholeness is what 
constitutes the world of appreciation, which is the world 
of truth. 


LECTURE XIII 

OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 

Too long I have detained yon, in the previous lecture, 
with the discussion of the intricate speculative problems 
suggested to us by the physical world. This evening I 
return to more practical issues. During the course of 
our historical discussions, we have had occasion to study 
the idealistic doctrines of earlier thinkers from two points 
of view. They appeared as efforts to explain the nature 
of human knowledge, and as attempts to give form to the 
spiritual interests of humanity. It is, of course, in the 
latter sense that idealism usually seems most attractive to 
the general reader. Other theories of the world may or 
may not be influenced by ethical considerations. A doc¬ 
trine which defines reality in terms of the absolute Self 
seems bound to make prominent the spiritual. In fact 
this is, to many minds, a defect of idealism, in that the 
doctrine appears to them rather the outcome of a moral 
enthusiasm than an embodiment of a cool and critical 
scrutiny of the world as it is. We have already tried, so 
far as our limited time permitted, to remove from idealism 
something of this reproach of being a mere poem of moral 
enthusiasm. We do not believe in the world of the abso¬ 
lute Self because we merely long for something spiritual 
in our world. The doctrine, such as I conceive it to be, 
seems to me rather the outcome of a rigid logical analysis, 
whose nature indeed I could only sketch in these brief 
lectures, but whose value for philosophy is indicated by 
the whole history of modern thought. Yet now that the 
theoretical question has been considered, we have a right 


436 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


in conclusion to draw what advantage we can for our spir¬ 
itual interests from the truths that theory has taught us. 


I. 

You are aware already how much and how little this 
idealism pretends to know about the world. The world 
has inevitably the moment of relatively capricious will 
about it. Its existence is a fact, chosen from eternity by 
the Self. We cannot fathom this choice, we cannot be 
clear as to the precise meaning of this decree, except in 
so far as we men too share in the choice, that is, in so far 
as we too, in our own active life, are conscious of our own 
purposes. In choosing for ourselves, we enter into and 
partake of the Self who chooses this from the infinity of 
possible worlds. No abstract “ descriptive ” reason can 
deduce what it is about the world which makes it good, that 
is, worth choosing. We can for the first only say, So it 
is. We can comprehend the significance of this world- 
estimate, of this appreciative aspect of things, only in so 
far as we too are appreciative, are more than theoretical, 
are will as well as thought. 

From the purely theoretical or “ descriptive ” point of 
view all will, all appreciation, is capricibus; for in vain 
do you try to show by merely describing the laws and 
contents of things why they should possess this or that 
value. Deduction only proves ideal values when such 
values have already been presupposed. 'Wet this capri¬ 
ciousness of the will is not, as Schopenhauer thought, 
irrationality. The rational will is one that to complete 
self-consciousness adds self-justification, and that is, ac¬ 
cordingly, its own judge and its own vindicator. Is the 
choice that wills the world of this nature ? Regarded 
from the purely theoretical side it must appear as capri¬ 
cious, for there can be no merely theoretical, or, as we are 
accustomed to say, logical reason, why it might not have 
chosen otherwise. But regarded as the choice of an eternal 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 437 

World-Self, the world cannot, so to speak, be the choice 
of a dissatisfied and peevish Logos, who eternally sorrows 
that he does not choose some other world instead. For 
dissatisfaction is due to either one of two causes: (1) 
That the dissatisfied will is not the only one concerned, 
but finds itself defeated by a foreign opponent; or (2) 
That the dissatisfied will is foolish, and knows not what it 
really wants. We finite bits of the Self are well ac¬ 
quainted with both these sources of grief; and since the 
World-Self is simply the self-conscious organism of all of 
us, he too is inevitably well acquainted with the nature of 
these our woes, and in so far shares them. But his 
acquaintance with our griefs need not be, cannot be, the 
sense of the entire failure of the whole organism of his 
timeless choice. That choice includes all the time events, 
and it is of the essence of temporal moments of conscious¬ 
ness to be discontented. But Hegel has already suggested 
to us how above the endless conflict victory may live. It 
is the purpose of this final lecture to give to that thought 
further illustration. 

Two principles must be propounded at the start. Their 
reconciliation may be difficult. They form in fact the 
opposing members of the great “ antinomy ” of the spirit¬ 
ual world. They are, that is, in sharp apparent conflict 
with each other. Yet they must both be true, for they 
are both demonstrable. 

One of them is the principle that there must be some 
sort of evil present wherever there is a finite will. It 
is not joyous to be finite, in so far as one is finite. One 
longs always to know more, and to possess more; and 
one lives in all sorts of paradoxical relations to other 
finite life. One lives in time, or in some such imperfect 
form of appreciative consciousness, and one preserves 
one’s finitude, and so one’s endless cares, by wondering 
and striving with some sort of reference to the other 
moments of time, to the other appreciations that lie be- 


438 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


yond one. To be sure all this has too its joyous side, in 
so far, namely, as there is more about our finite life than 
its mere finitude. Most of us had rather be finite than 
nothing, although even that is not necessarily our opinion. 
But to be bounded in a nut-shell and to have bad dreams 
as well is of the essence of temporality and finitude in so 
far as they are regarded as such. 

In view of this truth one can well say that, speaking in 
temporal terms, there just now is in the world nobody 
who is content with it. The Omar Khayyam stanzas of 
Fitzgerald are so far philosophically right, and forever 
true: — 

“ Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate 
I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, 

And many a Knot unravel’d by the Road ; 

But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate. 

“ There was the Door to which I found no Key ; 

There was the Veil through which I might not see : 

Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee 
There was — and then no more of Thee and Me. 

“ Earth could not answer ; nor the Seas that mourn 
In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn ; 

Nor rolling Heaven with all his Signs revealed 
And hidden by the sleeve of Night and Morn.” 

No better account could be given of the temporal order 
as it appears, when viewed appreciatively, at any finite 
moment, or of the inevitable result of seeking the divine 
or the satisfying therein. So viewed the seas are indeed 
of their Lord forlorn. As Lord he is found in no temporal 
moment, whether one passes through the “ seventh gate ” 
or not to look for him. If one is speaking of the com¬ 
plete God, the true Logos, and if one is using the temporal 
and not the eternal sense of is, it is perfectly accurate to 
say that God is not , say in the year 1892, just as he was 
not in Elijah’s fire and earthquake. He is no affair of con- 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 439 

temporary history. No reporter of even a celestial news¬ 
paper could discover, by any watching, items of current 
interest concerning him. His omnipresence is the presence 
of time and of space in him, not of his completeness in 
any part of them. He is their universal, they are not his 
prison. Therefore search the world as you might at this 
moment, with the well-known astronomer’s telescope that 
very truthfully showed no God, or with the eyes of men 
and angels; you would doubtless find only'discontented 
worms and seraphs, and other such finite toilers, — the 
whole creation groaning and travailing in pain, and cry¬ 
ing, Lord, how long ! For time is in fact very long, nor 
does one get to the end of sorrow in the whole of it. 
Some of these finite creatures would indeed be calling 
this or that temporal joy good, but all of them, however 
amused they were, would be in the act of striving for the 
next moment of time to come. For to do that seems to 
be of the very essence of temporal consciousness. Not 
one of them all who knew what he was saying would be 
uttering the fatal cry that Faust was to avoid: “ Oh 
moment, stay, thou art so fair! ” The best of their joyous 
moments would be under the illusion that the next mo¬ 
ment was likely to be a little better; and they would be 
hoping for that, as one hopes continually, while one listens 
to music, for the next phrase, and colors one’s joy with 
this longing. 

The other principle mentioned above is the thought 
that, notwithstanding all this, the Logos in his wholeness 
must find his choice of this universe rational, and so, in 
and through all this imperfection, must find a total per¬ 
fection. Were it a problem how to have a better world, 
the Self, as complete, would have solved the problem. 
Were it a question of a wiser choice, the Self in his wis¬ 
dom would have executed from eternity this wiser choice. 
Were it a matter of foreign necessity that inflicted evil, 
the Self would, in existing, have eternally absorbed this 


440 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


foreign element into his own organic nature. 1 The world 
that is, is then indeed, as Leibnitz said, the best of pos¬ 
sible worlds. The problem is, How can this be, without 
interfering with the foregoing principle of the essential 
evil of finite existence ? 

H. 

Let us begin our discussion of this ancient problem 
with its most immediately obvious illustration, the prob¬ 
lem of moral evil. One who first sees the truth that the 
world of the Self must be, in its wholeness, a good world, 
is likely to rejoice even too easily in the notion that 
through this insight he has come indeed very near to the 
goal that all the religions have sought. Yet one who finds 
himself thus close, as it were, to the gate of the celestial 
city and to a glimpse of the golden glories within it, nigh 
to the palace of the king, does, after all, well to tremble, 
nevertheless, when he considers how easy it is to say such 
things about the perfection of God’s world, and how hard 
it is to give concreteness and weight to the mere abstrac¬ 
tions of the religious consciousness. God’s world, in be¬ 
ing good, can surely be nothing less serious than a moral 
order. And a moral order, regarded from a temporal 
point of view, is so grave and stern a thing! Remember 
the fate of poor Ignorance, in Bunyan’s “ Pilgrim’s Prog¬ 
ress,” the fate that we mentioned when we were studying 
Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Poor Ignorance reached the 
very gate of the celestial city, yet the angels carried him 

1 Here, of course, Yon Hartmann’s doctrine of the twofold nature 
of his unconscious, as Will and Wisdom, these two being essentially 
foreign to each other, will suggest itself to some. The former lec¬ 
ture has suggested my own reason for holding that these two are 
inseparable. The parallelism and at the same time the opposition of 
my own views to those of Von Hartmann will be obvious to many 
readers. Like him I am endeavoring to draw a synthetic conclusion 
from the post-Kantian idealists, from Schopenhauer, and from modern 
science. I have worked, for the most part, quite independently of 
his influence. I must acknowledge his great value and his priority. 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 441 

away to the bottomless pit. Those who view the perfec¬ 
tion of God’s world merely in this first abstract fashion 
run indeed the risk of a similar fate. Pessimism and 
despair are not so far away from them as they think. It 
is not until they shall have learned somehow the serious¬ 
ness of the moral aspect of the divine order; it is not 
until they have faced the tragedy of life, as well as its 
divine consummation ; it is not until they have learned to 
recognize the moral order as essentially a hard master, 
and the misery of the finite world as a necessary element 
of the essentially severe significance of the universe; it is 
not until all this has come home to them that they will 
have any real right to the comfort that idealism offers. I 
want to make this fact plain. 

All popular religious faith usually begins, as we saw in 
an earlier lecture, by assuring a man after far too light 
and easy a fashion that everything will be well in this 
world for those who do God’s will, and that the moral 
order secures at once the triumph of the good cause, and 
the joy of all who serve this cause with a pure heart. 
Just at the present moment, curiously enough, despite all 
the skepticism of the day, such easy religious optimism as 
this chances to be in great popular favor ; and for all my 
idealism, I regret this popularity of optimism. During 
these controversies concerning creed-revisions and other 
forms of religious progress which have been before the 
public during the past few years, I have noticed not only 
that it has been customary to frown upon all attempts to 
defend stern old dogmas, such as the depravity of man 
and the universal condemnation of all our race in its 
unsaved condition, but that the reason given as an axio¬ 
matic justification for this disapproval has usually been a 
very optimistic reason. People who pretend at other 
times to be very agnostic, become here of a sudden very 
confident. It would be melancholy, they say, to live in a 
world where the heathen had not as fair a chance for sal 


442 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

vation as anybody else. It would be atrocious if tbe 
consequences of sin were to prove too grave. If we can¬ 
not reconcile a given supposition with the mercy of God, 
then the supposition must be false. And all this reason¬ 
ing, when more fully analyzed, usually proves to mean, in 
the minds of those who use it, a sense that if there is any 
spiritual order in this universe it must be an order that 
does not permit very many ills, and that, above all, does 
reward, quickly, all good efforts. Thus reasoning, the 
religious optimist of the day finds his comfort in an as¬ 
surance of the kindliness of God, of the early triumph of 
morality and of the general peacefulness of the universe, 
an assurance, I say, which, on the whole, I cannot share. 
I believe, indeed, that all the evil is part of a good order. 
I believe in the supremacy of the spiritual; and yet often 
during those popular controversies of recent years, I have 
found myself, as a relatively dispassionate metaphysical 
observer, sympathizing rather with the advocates of the 
sterner old creeds, not, to be sure, because I have accepted 
the sometimes irrational form which tradition had given 
to this or that dogma, but because I regretted the loss of 
moral rigidity which our fathers knew how to conceive as 
the very essence of the truly spiritual. But, not to weary 
you with the details of too well-known and unfruitful 
theological controversies, I may as well at once remind 
you of a modern poem which confesses in a most interest¬ 
ing fashion just such a religious optimism as I now have 
in mind, and as I do not accept. I am undertaking at this 
point a study and criticism of such a fashion of conceiving 
the world of spiritual concerns; I am glad to be able to 
let it express itself so fervently and skillfully. The poem 
which I refer to is one of the few really strong produc¬ 
tions of the interesting Southern poet, Sidney Lanier, 
whose death a few years since deprived our country of a 
promising, but so far comparatively undeveloped man. 
The poem, entitled “ How Love looked for Hell,” is in- 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 443 


tended to describe the world where all evil is purely illu¬ 
sory, and where the spirit triumphs by simply denying 
the existence of all its opponents. Many people, and for 
that matter many idealists, conceive their world in these 
terms. And I therefore let Lanier state their case : — 

“ To heal his heart of long-time pain 
One day Prince Love for to travel was fain 

With Ministers Mind and Sense. 

* Now what to thee most strange may be ? * 

Quoth Mind and Sense. * All things above, 

One curious thing I first would see, — 

Hell/ quoth Love. 

“Then Mind rode in and Sense rode out: 

They searched the ways of man about. 

First frightfully groaneth Sense, 

* ’T is here, ’t is here/ and spurreth in fear 
To the top of the hill that liangeth above 

And plucketh the Prince : * Come, come, ’t is here.’ 

* Where ? ’ quoth Love.” 

Accordingly, as Lanier proceeds to describe, Love fol¬ 
lows his minister Sense to the place where, according to 
the latter, there is a very black stream flowing, and where 
a very cold wind blows, while beyond the stream one can 
see lost souls struggling in burning lakes. Love goes 
very curiously to the place, hunting somewhat skeptically, 
as if, to borrow a certain modern and possibly too crudely 
optimistic comparison that I have sometimes found in use, 
he were an electric light engaged in the search for a 
shadow; and lo! when he reaches the spot in question, 
somehow the scene has become transformed. The black 
stream has changed to a living rill, and instead of the 
flaming lake beyond there are only lilies growing. 

Sense is of course somewhat disconcerted by this change 
of the scene. 

“ For lakes of pain, yon pleasant plain 
Of woods and grass and yellow grain 
Doth ravish the soul and sense j 


444 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


And never a sigh beneath the sky, 

And folk that smile and gaze above.’* 

Such a transformation Love has wrought by his mere 
coming, and in his unconsciousness he also wonders. 

“ Then Love rode round, and searched the ground, 

The caves below, the hills above ; 

‘ But I cannot find where thou hast found — 

Hell! ’ quoth Love.” 

Hereupon, however, Sense having failed, the other minis¬ 
ter is appealed to : — 

“ There, while they stood in a green wood 
And marveled still on Ill and Good, 

Came suddenly Minister Mind. 

‘In the heart of sin doth hell begin : 

’Tis not below, ’tis not above, 

It lieth within, it lieth within : * 

(‘ Where ? ’ quoth Love.) 

“ * I saw a man sit by a corse ; 

Hell’s in the murderer's breast: remorse ! * 

Thus clamored his mind to his mind ; 

Not fleshly dole is the sinner’s goal, 

* Hell’s not below, nor yet above, 

’T is fixed in the ever damned soul ’ — 

* Fixed ? ’ quoth Love. 

“ ‘ Fixed : follow me, would’st thou but see 
He weepeth under yon willow tree, 

Fast chained to his corse ! ’ quoth Mind. 

Full soon they passed, for they rode fast, 

Where the piteous willow bent above. 

‘ Now shall I see at last, at last, 

Hell,’ quoth Love. 

u There when they came Mind suffered shame % 

* These be the same and not the same ; ’ 

A-wondering whispered Mind. 

Lo, face by face two spirits pace 
Where the blissful willow waves above : 

One saith : * Do me a friendly grace — * 

(‘ Grace ! ’ quoth Love.) 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 445 

“ 4 Read me two dreams that linger long, 

Dim as returns of old-time song, 

That flicker about the mind. 

I dreamed (how deep in mortal sleep !) 

I struck thee dead, then stood above 
With tears that none but dreamers weep ; * 

‘ Dreams,’ quoth Love. 

“ 4 In dreams, again, I plucked a flower 

That clung with pain and stung with power. 

Yea, nettled me, body and mind. 

’T was the nettle of sin, ’t was medicine ; 

No need nor seed of it here Above ; 

In dreams of Hate true Loves begin.’ 

4 True,’ quoth Love. 

44 4 Now strange,’ quoth Sense, and 4 Strange,’ quoth Mind ; 

4 We saw it, and yet’t is hard to find, 

— But we saw it,’ quoth Sense and Mind. 

4 Stretched on the ground, beautiful crowned 
Of the piteous willow that wreathed above,’ 

4 But I cannot find where ye have found 
Hell,’ quoth Love.” 

Once more, then, Love fails, you see, since even as he 
approached Remorse, too, has fled. Thus Lanier depicted 
Love as wandering in his own universe. Mind and 
Sense find all sorts of mischief there, but they cannot 
show such things to their master. Abiding is only the 
ideal; evil is but the illusion. 

Here, then, is an embodiment, — in extreme form to be 
sure, but in a form that you will recognize, — of that mod¬ 
ern faith which, in curious contrast to the prevalent agnos¬ 
ticism of our age, defends the spiritual in the world by 
denying the very existence of evil. I need hardly tell 
you more at length how to many minds such a doctrine 
contains the very deepest essence of religion. In such a 
world, think they, we can make easy work of demonstrat¬ 
ing the immortality of the soul, the final restoration of 
all things, the unreality of Satan, the triumph of every 


446 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


good cause, in short, the gracious perfection which is hid¬ 
den behind every apparent and illusory evil of life. To 
such persons thus to deny ill is to have spiritual insight, 
and Love is indeed ignorant of hell just because Love 
knows all things. I do not know how far Lanier regarded 
this as a final doctrine. But let us for the moment treat 
it as such, and draw further conclusions for which he is 
indeed not responsible. 

Extremely characteristic of the mood of such religious 
optimism is in many minds a dread of the natural order 
as science knows it. Your optimist of this type, if he 
devotes himself to political theorizing, has a peculiarly 
violent dislike for economic facts. To his mind there are 
no evils in society except competition and poverty, which 
will both cease so soon as we by chance fall to loving one 
another, and to owning the property of the nation in 
common. Crime is not a result of anything deep in human 
nature ; selfishness is a mere incident of a defective social 
system. With fewer hours of labor, we should have many 
times the spirituality that we now have. Sin is not only 
mere ignorance; it is something still more limited; it is 
mere ignorance of the proper theory of the functions of 
government. Satan is mainly an invention of false theories 
in political economy. A single tax system, or a national¬ 
ized labor army, would end the sorrows of mankind, and 
make us all artists and patriots. The end of human woe 
is n’t far off ; the day of the Lord is at hand. 

The day of the Lord is in fact, in one form or another, 
the favorite hope of these romantic optimists. Evil being 
only an illusion, the spiritual powers being in complete 
ownership of the entire world, there is no reason why any 
day the scene of our sorrow should not be entirely trans¬ 
formed. In the hope of such transformation the faithful 
wait and trust. Meanwhile they expect little help from 
mere science, which once for all deals with the world of 
mind and of sense in a lower sphere. The truth of the 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 447 

spirit is not plain to the natural man ; the faithful rather 
pray to the Lord that such an one’s eyes may be opened, 
so that he may see the chariots of the Lord all about him. 
Then he will believe in his immortal destiny, he will for¬ 
sake remorse, gloom, dread, yes, even strenuousness itself. 
Spirituality, after all, is n’t a very strenuous thing. That 
is n’t its true quality. It rather blesseth him that gives 
and him that takes. In the world of the divine love all 
is well. 


in. 

But now is this, after all, a truly spiritual doctrine of 
the world ? Is this the notion of life and its problems 
to which a genuine idealism leads us ? I confess that I 
do not think so ; I hold rather that Love, in Sidney La¬ 
nier’s vision, was rather the deluded one, or, if you like, 
the deceiver ; I hold that good is the final goal of ill in a 
wholly different sense, and that the gravity of the issues 
of the spiritual world is one which no one is fitted to under¬ 
stand until he has once fairly comprehended the sense 
and the bitterness of such a pessimism as even that of 
Schopenhauer himself. For a true pessimism, not as the 
last word of wisdom, but as an element of the true doc¬ 
trine, is as much a moment in genuine spirituality as 
tragedy is a part of the fortune of true love. Even in 
Lanier’s poem Love had felt heart-pain, and needed heal¬ 
ing. Evil is not a dream, but a bitter truth, which we 
make spiritual by conquering it. And as for the day of 
the Lord, as for the moment when the divinely grave 
meaning, the genuine spirituality, of the world dawns 
upon man’s comprehension, the first of the great prophets 
whose literary remains have come down to us from the 
days of ancient Israel fully expressed the essential fact 
concerning that experience when he said to the optimists 
of his time : “Woe unto you that desire the day of the 
Lord ! To what end is it for you ? The day of the Lord 


448 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a 
lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and 
leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him.” 

I assure you in all earnestness, speaking as an idealist, 
as one who longs to have men recognize the spiritual order, 
to believe in the supremacy of the good in this our world, 
to rise above sense, and to feel secure of the rationality of 
the universe, — speaking thus, I still regard as one of 
the most lamentable and disheartening features in our 
modern life the dreary opposition between those who, 
studying the order of nature as science shows it, remain 
agnostic about the spiritual realities of the world, and 
those who, on the other hand, believing, as they say, in a 
divine order, remain gently optimistic, and refuse to look 
at the woes and horrors of the world of Darwin and of 
science, because forsooth, since the Lord reigns, all must 
be right with the world. Thus on the one hand we have 
a romantic idealism that loves, with false liberalism, to 
cheapen religious faith by ignoring all the graver dogmas 
of the traditional creeds, that invents, meanwhile, social 
utopias, that denies the profound waywardness and wick¬ 
edness of human nature, and that refuses to grapple by 
the throat the real ills of life ; while on the other hand 
we have an agnosticism that refuses to believe in the spir¬ 
itual, because once for all there is so much mischief in the 
phenomenal order of nature. A genuine synthesis of this 
optimism and its opposing pessimism, a spiritual idealism 
that does not deny the reality and the gravity of evil, a 
religion that looks forward to the day of the Lord as to 
something very great and therefore very serious, and that 
accepts life as something valuable enough to be tragic 
— this is what we need. 

In human history the schoolmaster to bring us to the 
higher sense of what a genuine idealism means has al¬ 
ways been just that bitter sense of the unreality and 
vanity of religious optimism which Amos so fervently 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 449 

expressed, and which for other thinkers, for a Voltaire or 
for a Swift, has frequently taken either the form of a 
skeptical assault upon all faith in the supremacy of the 
good in the universe, or else the shape of a cynical despair 
which, at all events in man’s nature, could find no encour¬ 
aging feature. The difficulties of religious optimism are 
indeed manifold enough. If all is ordered for the best in 
the best of possible worlds, if, in the presence of the 
divine love, even the hell of remorse itself ceases to exist, 
if what is called sin is a mere medicine of the soul, a net¬ 
tle that stings a trifle, in order that we may be the better 
spiritually for the experience, if in a higher state we shall 
see that there was positively nothing to lament in this 
mortal life, then indeed the whole universe of action loses 
its gravity and its earnestness. Why should I not sin, 
since sin also is an illusion ? Why not experience the 
sting of the nettle of crime, since that also is a medicine ? 
If all is well, what is there to resist, to conquer, to 
change, to meet courageously, to regret, to avoid ? If 
divine wisdom is present equally in the highest and the 
lowest, equally in the good and in the ill, then why resist 
the unreal evil ? Whatever I am God chooses me, and 
surely not as a vessel of wrath, for there is no wrath in 
him at all, only gentleness, love, peace. 

I need not dwell on such difficulties of the optimistic 
scheme. In its spirituality, as you see, it is in danger of 
becoming out and out immoral. Nor need I point out 
how, along with the study of the empirical facts which 
show us the world full of apparent ills all about us, these 
fundamental difficulties of optimism have led many to 
abandon altogether the hope of vindicating for any spir¬ 
itual order a supremacy in our world. And, in fact, for 
those who, like myself, accept a general idealistic scheme 
of things there would seem at first sight to be no resource 
open, but either a resigned acceptance of the divine order 
as something to be conceived only in mystical terms, or 
else a consent to such a pessimism as Schopenhauer’s. 


450 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


The first resource here, to wit, mystical resignation, 
which once for all accepts the divine order as real and 
supreme, which still admits that the finite world is full of 
evil, and which then solves its problem by simply refus¬ 
ing to face it, and by surrendering all clear thought in 
favor of a rapt and helpless adoration of God, — this re¬ 
source is already known to us from our study of Spinoza, 
and, still better, of the “ Imitation.” Your mystic is never 
an optimist of the type suggested in Sidney Lanier’s 
poem. He rather loves to dwell on the miseries of the 
finite life. These are for him perfectly real miseries. 
The source of them, however, is simply our own absorp¬ 
tion in our finitude. Why the divine order permits us to 
become thus absorbed is never clear, nor can it be made 
clear for the mystic. It is God who knows, not I, why I 
am thus imprisoned in the fatal misery of my finite igno¬ 
rance. What he means by letting me become finite is 
utterly mysterious. I submit to this, as to everything 
else: — 

“ The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, 

But Here or There as strikes the Player goes ; 

And he that toss’d you down into the Field, 

He knows about it all — He knows — He knows.” 

The divine wisdom is existent for itself, not for me. It is 
remote, foreign, impenetrable, so long indeed as I remain 
finite. If I consent to lose myself indeed, there may 
come moments of ecstasy, when I shall, as it were at the 
moment of my vanishing, seem to catch a glimpse of 
God’s meaning. But the glimpse will mean little; it will 
be inexpressible, a divine suggestion, with no bearings 
upon practical life in this world. 

Are we now, as idealists, condemned to such a mysti¬ 
cism as this ? If we are, is not the way indeed a short one 
to Schopenhauer’s pessimism ? In fact, all the three views 
of life that we have just been considering are not so 
remote from one another in their oppositions as might 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 451 

seem at first sight to be the case. The fact is that the 
finite world is full of at least apparent evils. Religious 
optimism of the simple-minded sort simply denies their 
actual existence. God’s perfection, it says, excludes 
them. They are n’t anything positive. They are essen¬ 
tially unreal. All is light and clear when viewed from 
above. The ills of life, including even the crimes of the 
world of sense, vanish from God’s point of view. Mysti¬ 
cal resignation, on the contrary, while asserting that the 
evils of life have a genuine existence, deprives them of 
any significant place in the divine order as such. The 
evils are, for the mystic, once more illusions, only so long 
as you remain in the finite world they are necessary illu¬ 
sions. God, too, knows them to be here in our finite 
world, doubtless even wills them to be here, so long as we 
remain remote from absorption in him. The sins in¬ 
separable from our finite existence are imposed upon us 
as the penalties of our consenting to remain apart from 
him. The difference between these two views is, that, on 
the one hand, for the believer in Sidney Lanier’s con¬ 
quest of divine Love, the higher insight brings with it to 
the finite beings a certain joy in their very finitude, a 
delight in their own past sins, in these experiences that 
have proved a medicine to them. This joy seems to make 
them content with the flowers and caresses of their world. 
On the other hand, the mystical resignation never sees in 
the finite world anything but dust and ashes, and to the 
end turns from it scornfully to God, who is the only 
good. Yet the two views agree in this, that they both 
alike deprive the finite world of all gravity and of all 
deeper ethical significance. What we do here, our work, 
our purposes, our problems, our doubts, our battles, all 
these things have for the mystic as for the optimist no 
essential meaning. There are no issues in the finite 
world for either view. And this idea, that just because 
there are no true issues in the finite world, just because 


452 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


there is no gravity about it, nothing stern, nothing worthy 
of a good fight, no salvation that may be lost, and is hard 
to win, no significant toil that ought to be entered upon 
and that is calling for us with the voice of a positive duty 
— that just because of all this our life is essentially vain; 
what is such an idea but the very essence of pessimism 
itself ? Pessimism, then, the sense of the utter vanity of 
life, is the necessary outcome of every half-hearted scheme 
of the moral order, of every scheme which says you can 
escape the evils of finitude, if at all, only in case you can 
find some way to deny their existence. For the fact is 
that from every such half-hearted scheme of the moral 
order we return to the facts of life themselves. There 
they are, our ills and our sins — denying does not destroy 
them, calling them illusions does not remove them, de¬ 
claring them utterly insignificant only makes all the more 
hollow and empty the life of which they are an organic 
part. If, then, the only escape of our philosophy from the 
individual ills of life lies in denying their significance, and 
so the significance of this whole seeming world whereof 
they are a part, then indeed are we of all men most mis¬ 
erable. For our life is in this world. And if the world 
of experience is only a vain show, then the last word is a 
sense of the utter illusoriness and insignificance of the 
issues of life which is the very essence of pessimism. 

Or once more, to put the matter more concretely: If 
one who had long been toiling courageously up the steep 
and narrow path of virtue, fighting sin after sin, doing 
good as it was given him, aiming in his little way for the 
victory of righteousness in the finite world, if such an 
one, I say, has suddenly revealed to him as a truth the 
substance of Lanier’s vision of all-conquering Love, who 
wins not by warfare with ill, but by a simple ignoring of 
ill, in whose presence crimes become the medicine of the 
soul, and hatreds the germs of the glorified friendships of 
free spirits — will not your moral hero of the finite world, 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 453 

scarred with his long warfare, worn with toils and sor¬ 
rows, a patient servant of the good cause which as he 
fondly had hoped needed him — will he not see the cheat 
and delusion of all his warfare ? What vainer than the 
conflict with all the powers of hell, when there are no 
such powers? Will he not say of us all in a new and 
bitter sense: — 

“ ’T is we who wrapt in gloomy visions keep 
With phantoms an unprofitable strife ” ? 

Nay, what shall it profit us that after the manner of men 
we have fought wild beasts at Ephesus? There are no 
wild beasts, you see. It was all a dream, our morality. 
This optimistic awakening, — could any irony of fate 
seem to us more bitter ? We have offered our little all to 
virtue, and the offering was vain; for in the world of 
truth there was no offering to bring to virtue. Thus the 
whole moral conduct of finite beings proves to be based 
upon as irrational a striving as that which makes Scho¬ 
penhauer call the blind world-will so worthless a thing. If 
the mystical interpretation of life be the right one, if the 
finite world is indeed simply banished from God, and has 
no share in him except at the moment when it denies 
itself, the pessimistic result is once more the plain one. 
All these half-hearted views, in their endless dialectic, 
resolve themselves into the same vanity. 

And yet they are not without worth — these partial 
insights — as approaches to the truth. When religious 
optimism declares the joyous divine love to be all-conquer¬ 
ing and omnipresent, it is trying to express a truth. Dis¬ 
satisfied with his eternal world the divine Self cannot be. 
It is only in the temporal world that from moment to 
moment, as the drama changes, there is of necessity rest¬ 
lessness, evil, strife, and therefore a serious business in¬ 
volved. That the evil also, however real to the finite 
being, however lamentable or hateful from the finite point 


454 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


of view, has its place in the perfection of the Self, this is 
what optimism means, and in so far it is right. The 
truth in fact will lie somehow in a synthesis of all these 
points of view, for all three have a certain relative valid¬ 
ity. The genuine moral order must contain that “per¬ 
fection in imperfection ” which Browning, in his best and 
most vital poems, was always striving to describe to us. 
Thus constituted it must be indeed problematic, even as 
the mystics make it, and tragic, even as the pessimists 
declare it, but also somehow perfect just as optimism 
dreams. 

IV. 

Can we now suggest, from an idealistic point of view, 
how the world of the one Self can be thus at once a world 
of moral issues, and a world of moral completeness; a 
world of goodness, and yet a world where evil has its genu¬ 
ine place ; a world of restless spirituality, where at every 
moment of time there is something for moral agents to do, 
and a world of supreme triumph, where the spirit eter¬ 
nally rests from his labors ? All these things, apparently, 
a moral order which is to be at once divine in its perfec¬ 
tion so that we can worship it, and great in its needs 
so that our life may not be vain as we try to serve the 
good — all these paradoxically opposed qualities a moral 
order must contain. Is it conceivable that they should 
be reconciled ? Is not the very attempt an absurdity ? I 
answer that, on the contrary, if you look at the matter 
fairly, and from the point of view of an idealist’s inter¬ 
pretation of life, nothing is more possible than just such 
an union of the apparently conflicting requirements of the 
religious conception of the world. 

Consider, then, that more familiar problem of practical 
and daily life with whose philosophical bearings our his¬ 
torical study of Hegel and of Schopenhauer has now 
made us acquainted. All living, in the first place, how. 
ever commonplace its aims, however accidental its ideals, 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 455 

involves a deep paradox. We long to live. Very well, 
then, we long to be active. For life means activity ; and 
activity, that again means longing, striving, suffering 
lack, hoping for the end of the activity in which we are 
immediately engaged. This is the essence of living, just 
as Schopenhauer said. Life is will; and every will aims 
at its own completion, that is, at its own cessation. I will 
to be wiser than I am. Well, then, I will that my present 
foolishness shall cease. I will to get somebody’s love; 
and that means that I will the cessation of my unloved 
condition. Every will aims at the attainment of its 
desire ; and attainment is the death of just this desire, 
and so of just this act of will. And yet, on the whole, I 
will to live. I will then that which will always be in one 
sense a longing for its own cessation; I will to suffer 
lack; I desire to be always desiring. My highest good, 
then, whatever my life, will always have this tinge of bit¬ 
terness about it, will always be a restless, longing, suffer¬ 
ing good. Hegel saw this paradox, declared it to be the 
very essence of spirituality, gloried in it, and founded his 
whole system on the paradoxical logic of passion. Scho¬ 
penhauer saw the same truth in another light, and aban¬ 
doned hope in life because of the universality of this 
truth. As for us, we have found reason to side in this 
one respect rather with Hegel. The life that we seek in 
this world cannot be colorlessly perfect. At the very low¬ 
est estimate of its seriousness it has the worth and the 
risk of the game about it. We win only by risking de¬ 
feat ; we have our courage only by conquering our fear; 
we can triumph in life only by transcending the pains of 
risk and of conflict even while they are in us and part 
of us. Well, if this be so in other sorts of life, may it 
not also be so in the moral life ? Sin is moral defeat, 
and is therefore indeed a part of a world where there is 
serious moral effort, just as lost games are part of the 
world of every earnest player. Imagine, then, that the 


456 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


infinite Self, in the unity of his eternal life, wills a com¬ 
plete moral consciousness. Must not this consciousness 
express itself in a world of finite persons, each one of 
whom is limited enough not merely to strive and suffer, 
but also to be in danger of sin? Many of these moral 
agents, then, will sin, will fail in the conflict of life. 
Their errors will not be unreal; their remorse will not be 
an illusion. But in the spiritual tragedy of the world as 
known to the divine perfection their failure will have the 
share that bitterness and sorrow always have in the life 
of the stern and earnest will. Or, once again, to make 
this notion of the moral world clearer, remember that, as 
we saw at the last time, the infinite Self, looking at the 
world in its entirety, must contain, must include, must 
consciously possess its whole spiritual world, as the musi¬ 
cal consciousness, in its estimate of the succession of 
sounds, contains not merely the single notes, not merely 
the chords as they come singly in time, but the whole 
symphony, whose dissonances may thus be moments in the 
eternal perfection of the whole. Regarded temporally, 
music, which, as Schopenhauer suggested, does in this 
respect resemble the whole life of the will, is restless, in¬ 
satiable, unable to give you any perfection at any single 
moment of its progress. Everything it gets only to flee 
from its own attainment. And even the final chords 
which its striving reaches in any composition would be 
worthless if alone. Yet this finite and temporal imper¬ 
fection, this restless flight from every note, every melody, 
every chord, every chord-sequence, constitutes the indwell¬ 
ing perfection of the whole work. Mozart, as you may 
know, used to say, in words which the German philoso¬ 
pher Yon Hartmann has very significantly quoted, that 
the blessedest moment of his artistic production was the 
one wherein this significance of his whole composition 
came home to him in one instant, wherein as it were he 
transcended time, and possessed all the succession of rest- 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 457 

less musical strivings in one artistic glance. “ My ideas,” 
says, in substance, Mozart, in a letter to a friend, “ come 
as they will, I don’t know how, all in a stream. If I like 
them I keep them in my head, and people say that I often 
hum them over to myself. Well, if I can hold on to them, 
they begin to join on to one another, as if they were bits 
that a pastry cook should joint together in his pantry. 
And now my soul gets heated, and if nothing disturbs me 
the piece grows larger and brighter until, however long it 
is, it is all finished at once in my mind, so that I can see 
it at a glance as if it were a pretty picture or a pleasing- 
person. Then I don’t hear the notes one after another, 
as they are hereafter to be played, but it is as if in my 
fancy they were all at once. And that is a revel ( das ist 
nun ein Schmaus ). While I’m inventing, it all seems to 
me like a fine vivid dream ; but that hearing it all at once 
(when the invention is done), that’s the best. What I 
have once so heard I forget not again, and perhaps this is 
the best gift that God has granted me.” 

Well, such non-temporal grasping of the significance of 
a restless temporal progress, we must indeed attribute, as 
we have seen, to the Self in whom our logical analysis 
found the realization of all truth. The truth of time 
must be seen by the absolute Knower, as Mozart saw his 
whole compositions. For that is, not the dream, but the 
technically defensible result which our idealism has forced 
upon us. If what we have to call the infinite past and 
future have even at this instant a genuine truth, so that 
of any moment in the past or in the future there is only 
one of two contradictory assertions now true, then the infi¬ 
nite Self to whom I appeal when I talk of past and future 
must, in the eternal sense, grasp and possess the whole of 
time. After this fashion, then, the very paradox may be 
realized by his-consciousness which we are now seeking 
to explain, the paradox of a world where, in the individ¬ 
ual moments of life, there is indeed evil, dissonance, 


458 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY". 


tragedy, restlessness, imperfection, where the struggle 
with these things is not illusory, and where the value of 
the whole does not come, as in Sidney Lanier’s dream, 
through an abolition of the knowledge of individual ills, 
through an ignoring of evil, whether physical or moral, 
but rather through an eternal insight into the value of 
the entire restless life of the whole temporal world. 

But perhaps you may say that such a vindication as this 
of the perfection of the divine order does not, after all, 
sufficiently do justice to the gravity of the moral world. 
The moral world, as experience shows it to us, is not 
a symphony, nor anything else artistic, but either it is a 
world of moral agony, of crime, of darkness, as Amos 
said, and not of light, or else our conscience, in condemn¬ 
ing sin as absolutely hateful, is wrong. Conscience de¬ 
clares that moral evil simply ought not to exist. Moral 
evil is n’t a mere dissonance in the world-symphony, any 
more than it is, as Sidney Lanier’s optimistic dream made 
it, a gentle medicine for the soul. Sin is through and 
through regrettable, diabolical. It ought not to exist. 
No contrast of temporal and eternal will save us here. 
So, in its stern hatred of the wrong, our moral conscious¬ 
ness seems to declare. Can our idealism aid us in recon¬ 
ciling the divine perfection with such dissonances, with 
such paradoxes as these of the moral world ? 

Well, I admit, indeed, that it is very hard to formulate 
the truth as to this problem without giving it the false 
accent. Yet, after all, we have now in our hands all the 
elements that are necessary for a genuine solution of the 
problem of the existence of sin, in so far, at least, as it 
is related to the consciousness of the sinner himself. 
Spiritual evil has, to be sure, other aspects that will need 
yet more study. 

Sin, says our moral consciousness, is utterly hateful, 
and ought not to exist in a perfect world. If our moral 
consciousness is wrong in asserting this, then one appar- 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 459 

ently returns to Lanier’s superficial optimism. Evil is 
only illusory. But in that case, as we saw, the world 
utterly loses deeper significance. If, however, moral evil, 
as it exists in the sinner’s soul, is not illusory, then how 
can the divine order be at once good and triumphant, in a 
world where there is so much sin ? The answer is sug¬ 
gested to us by a consideration not now of sin as such, 
but of latent sin, namely, of temptation. In the world of 
our own acts we have an experience which is very enlight¬ 
ening as to the paradoxical constitution of the whole 
moral world. Only the tempted, as we saw when we 
studied Hegel’s doctrine, — only the tempted can be holy. 
For instance, if I find in myself an evil impulse, I find 
what in itself considered is, indeed, something hateful, 
lamentable, possibly horrible, something which regarded 
for itself can apparently form no part of a good order. 
If I tolerate the impulse, if I declare it to be just the nettle 
of sin, if I call its evil illusory, then my moral optimism 
is indeed open to the condemnation of Amos, who cries 
woe upon all such vindications of the divine order. But 
suppose I resist the evil impulse, hate it, hold it down, 
overcome it, then, in this moment of hating and condemn¬ 
ing it I make it a part of my larger moral goodness. 
The justification of the existence of my evil impulse comes 
just at the instant when I hate and condemn it. Con¬ 
demning and conquering the evil will makes it part of a 
good will. Here is the paradox of all will stated not now 
in artistic but in moral terms. There are elements in a 
good world which, individually regarded, ought not to be 
there, which are in themselves hateful, regrettable, the just 
object of wrath. Yet they become part of the world of 
the good will just in so far as they are in fact hated, con¬ 
demned, subdued, overcome. The good world is not inno¬ 
cent. It does not ignore evil; it possesses and still con¬ 
quers evil. 

Well, then, if this is true of our latent sins, of our 


460 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


resisted temptations, if they are permissible parts of a 
moral order, in so far as they are condemned and hated 
by our larger moral consciousness, then, I ask, may not 
the same be true of our actual sins, only in a yet graver 
and more tragic sense ? Is n’t there a deep truth after 
all in the stern theology that said that even sin exists for 
the glory of God, but that God’s glory is vindicated not 
through an ignoring, but through a hating and a triumph¬ 
ing over sin? “I,” a sinner may say, “am in all my 
wickedness a part of the divine order, which is perfect. 
Therefore my sin is illusory.” We answer, not illusory 
is this sin. Only, just because our idealism makes of the 
divine Self one transcendent person, in whom and for 
whom are all things, persons, and acts, just for this reason 
there is open to us a vindication of the moral order of 
God, which will insist at once upon the gravity of sin and 
upon the perfection of the divine morality. In God, so 
we say to the willful sinner, you are a part of a good will, 
which bears just such organic relation to your sinfulness 
as, in a good man, his virtue bears to the evil impulse 
that forms a part of his goodness. The hatred and con¬ 
demnation of just your life and character makes God 
holy. God loves you, indeed, in so far as you are in any 
wise worthy; but just in so far as you are a rebel, you 
enter into the perfect moral order, not because your evil 
is illusory, but because God knows you to hate you and to 
triumph over you. Your evil will bears to his the rela¬ 
tion that a brave man’s fears bear to his triumphant 
courage, just the relation that a good man’s weaknesses 
bear to the scorn which his conscience feels towards such 
weaknesses. Just because of that unity of the infinite 
Self which idealism teaches, God’s organic perfection vin¬ 
dicates sin by scorning it, makes it a part of his moral 
order only by hating it, binds in the chains of his hatred 
all the countless ills of the finite world, and rests in his 
eternal perfection beyond the moral dissonances of the 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 461 

temporal world, just because everywhere in this tem¬ 
poral world each dissonance is resolved, is condemned, is 
restlessly transcended. Whatever we are, we are, indeed, 
a part of God’s perfection. But the question is, what 
sort of part ? Are we there to be scorned, despised, con¬ 
demned by the organic Self, whose perfection will be vin¬ 
dicated in such case through the very courage and em¬ 
phasis of its scorn and hatred for us? If so, whatever 
our sin, it is part of the moral order, only the moral order 
exists by conquering us, and we live only to be despised 
by the very Self that includes us. God’s holiness we, 
then, assist, but only as the evil impulse serves the saint’s 
triumphant higher self. God’s glory we then, in our way, 
also serve, but only as vessels of his wrath. But do we 
ourselves choose the good ? Then once more we enter into 
the divine order, but this time as vessels of honor, as min¬ 
isters of the good, as servants and not as enemies, as co¬ 
workers and not as rebels, as beloved and not as scorned. 

Thus I have tried to show you how idealism, by its 
very definition of the divine Self as the one organic per¬ 
sonality, in whom and for whom we all exist, is able 
to suggest a solution of this one amongst the religious 
problems of the ages, and a synthesis of the truths that 
are at the heart both of moral optimism and of moral 
pessimism, both of the mystical and of the morally 
active religious piety, both of the faith in God’s eternal 
perfection and of the desire to do right in the temporal 
world. All this, you remember, is true, so far as to the 
explanation of the existence of sin as it exists within the 
evil-doer’s soul. There is another aspect of the problem 
of evil that is much darker from our finite point of view 
than this one ; and to this other aspect I must pass as I 
close. 

Y. 

For I do not feel that I have yet quite expressed the 
full force of the deepest argument for pessimism, or the 


462 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


full seriousness of the eternal problem of evil. In fact, 
when, in the past, I have gone over these considerations in 
company with those of my fellows who have experienced 
widely and deeply, I have always found that whether they 
were themselves naturally disposed to be pessimists or not, 
they declined to recognize this way of looking at our 
question about evil as really exhausting the meaning of 
it. The mood that genuinely questions the value of life 
is after all a very gloomily ingenious mood. Its dialectic 
is endless ; it turns its reflection from sorrow to sorrow, 
with a remorselessly industrious scrutiny; it refuses easy 
comfort; it readily finds the philosopher’s formulas pedan¬ 
tic and unspiritual; and in fact no lighter experience of 
grief, no superficial disappointment, no mere wounded 
sentiment, nor yet even a transient remorse, can give you 
a true sense of what the problem of evil is. Even that 
remorse which Lanier’s poem depicts is ill-adapted to ex¬ 
press whether hell has its seat in this universe. In fact, 
to see where the worst problems of life lie is a very black 
experience. And yet, so much does human reason love 
insight, that I have never met a man who was alive to 
these deepest problems, and who still repented him of his 
insight. The strong and hearty beings who know not the 
clear bitterness of all higher truth often wonder how men 
can doubt as to the worth of life, and often condemn as 
mere morbidness every such scrutiny as that in which we 
are now engaged. Many persons I know, and honor, too, 
— men of cheerful souls and well-knit purposes, high- 
minded men and strenuous, to whom every ultimate, 
above all every philosophical inquiry as to this matter of 
the meaning and the final justification of life, seems essen¬ 
tially either vain or dangerous. Why we live, they say, 
and what our duty is, and why it is a worthy thing to do 
our duty, and how evil is to be explained, — to ask this 
why f is to hesitate, to dream, to speculate, to poison life. 
The best thing is to work and not to inquire. 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 463 

Yet there is another way of viewing life, and that is 
just the way upon which we have been dwelling. It is the 
way of men who demand ultimate answers, and who, if 
they can’t get them, prefer doubt, even if doubt means 
despair. Pessimism, in the true sense, is n’t the doctrine 
of the merely peevish man, but of the man who, to bor¬ 
row a word of Hegel’s, “has once feared not for this 
moment or for that in his life, but who has feared with 
all his nature; so that he has trembled through and 
through, and all that was most fixed in him has become 
shaken.” There are experiences in life that do just this 
for us. And when the fountains of the great deep are 
once thus broken up, and the floods have come, it is n’t 
over this or that lost spot of our green earth that we sor¬ 
row ; it is because of all that endless waste of tossing 
waves which now rolls cubits deep above the top of what 
were our highest mountains. In our natural state, you 
see, we desire many things, some more, and some less; 
life has its strange mingling of joys and of pangs; but 
there is nothing in it absolute, nothing whose place 
couldn’t be taken by another. We are, then, cheerful 
and reasonably content, just because everything in our 
world has its price, and can conceivably be gained by 
finite labor ; nor is there for us anything this side death 
that might not, with good fortune, turn out well for us. 
This is the mood that, of course, with an inaccurate use 
of the superlative, and so with a very characteristic ex¬ 
aggeration of speech, common sense calls optimism. The 
mood which really opposes it, however, is just the mood 
that has learned to demand absolute standards, and that 
finds none ; the mood that refuses to be comforted with 
such good things as can be brought, because it longs for 
the priceless goods of the spirit. This opposing mood, 
then, this true pessimism, is in its very nature the mood 
of the painfully awakened, who cry for God’s truth, and 
who so far find it not. It is the despair of those who 


464 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


want a plan in life, and who see how our ordinary and 
natural life is planless, accidental, a mere creature of for¬ 
tune. This despair is the first voice, in many hearts, of 
the truly devout spirit. He who has never felt it does 
not know what the deepest religious experience must in¬ 
volve. And he who has once become possessed of this 
longing for a deeper meaning in life than natural expe¬ 
rience can give or can find there, would not for worlds 
exchange his insight, gloomy as he may find, it, for the 
vain cheerfulness of unchastened optimism. Better, to 
his mind, this waste of dark tossing waves than the blind 
and misbelieving world before the flood ; better to be 
broken in spirit, than to be vainly puffed up with miser¬ 
able finite conceits. 

Well, it is just this absolutely inquiring mood, just this 
thorough-going doubt, that we shall not yet have shaken 
by all the foregoing. Easy it is, such doubt will say, easy 
it is to refute the religious optimists of Lanier’s type ; 
easy it is to get past the stately resignation of the mysti¬ 
cal mood ; easy, too, if you will, for an idealist, to justify 
the existence of countless evils in the finite world, if only 
they have the less tragic type. Only there are still doors 
to which we have found no key. The eternal insight of 
the All-knower may look in lofty peace upon the rest¬ 
less flight of our time - moments. Everywhere in his 
world there will be change and dissatisfaction ; yet in 
his completeness he may judge it all as good. But there 
is still one condition that must be met by the struggles of 
the finite world, if they are obviously to conform to this 
solution of our problem. They must, namely, be signifi¬ 
cant conflicts. If they are, then, so far, the difference of 
the eternal and the temporal aspects does, indeed, aid us. 
As for the willing sinner and his just remorse, it is n’t in 
his case that one need feel deeply concerned. He has 
played the game of sin ; he is only exemplifying the rules 
of the game. The awakened sinner may sometimes ban- 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 465 

ish himself almost cheerfully to that hell, bearing, with a 
stern contempt for his own sorrow, the bitterness of his 
moral defeat. 

No, the worst tragedy of the world is the tragedy of 
the brute chance to which everything spiritual seems to be 
subject amongst us — the tragedy of the diabolical irra¬ 
tionality of so many among the foes of whatever is sig¬ 
nificant. An open enemy you can face. The temptation 
to do evil is indeed a necessity for spirituality. But one’s 
own foolishness, one’s ignorance, the cruel accidents of dis¬ 
ease, the fatal misunderstandings that part friends and 
lovers, the chance mistakes that wreck nations: — these 
things we lament most bitterly, not because they are pain¬ 
ful, but because they are farcical, distracting, — not foe- 
men worthy of the sword of the spirit, nor yet mere pangs 
of our finitude that we can easily learn to face courage¬ 
ously, as one can be indifferent to physical pain. No, 
these things do not make life merely painful to us; they 
make it hideously petty. They are like the “ mean 
knights ” that beat down Lancelot during his hopeless 
wandering in search of the Grail. 

Some of you may know a little poem called “ The 
Fool’s Prayer,” a bit of verse that was first printed some 
years ago, and that has more recently been rather often 
quoted by the author’s growing circle of readers and ad¬ 
mirers. The author himself, a man of not altogether 
happy destiny, is now dead. I knew him well; he was 
first a valued teacher and adviser of my own, and after¬ 
wards an intimate friend. The words sprang so earnestly 
from his heart, and they suggest our problem here so 
thoughtfully, that I may venture to repeat the most of 
them: — 

“ The royal feast was done ; the king 
Sought out some new sport to banish care, 

And to his jester cried : * Sir Fool, 

Kneel now, and make for us a prayer.’ 


466 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY, 


“ The jester doffed his cap and bells 
And stood the mocking court before ; 

They could not see the bitter smile 
Behind the painted grin he wore. 

« He bowed his head, and bent his knee 
Upon the monarch’s silken stool ; 

His pleading voice arose : ‘ O Lord, 

Be merciful to me, a fool! 

*“ No pity, Lord, could change the heart 
From red with wrong to white as wool ; 

The rod must heal the sin ; but Lord, 

Be merciful to me, a fool ! 

“ ‘ Tis not by guilt the onward sweep 
Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay ; 

’T is by our follies that so long 
We hold the earth from heaven away* 

“ ‘ These clumsy feet, still in the mire, 

Go crushing blossoms without end ; 

These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust 
Among the heart-strings of a friend 

“ ‘ The ill-timed truth we might have kept — 

Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung ? 

The word we had not sense to say — 

Who knows how grandly it had rung ? 

“ * Our faults no tenderness should ask, 

The chasteuing stripes must cleanse them all ; 

But for our blunders — oh, in shame 
Before the eyes of heaven we fall. 

1 Earth bears no balsam for mistakes ; 

Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool 
That did his will ; but thou, O Lord, 

Be merciful to me, a fool.’ ” 

I think that you will see how my old friend here sug¬ 
gested where the burden of the problem of evil lies much 
more wisely than Lanier did. For my friend, who wrote 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE•MORAL ORDER. 467 

these words, thus touched upon one element of that caprice 
of life which does prove the crudest note in all its trage¬ 
dies. As I knew him, the poet of these verses was pecu¬ 
liarly sensitive to the presence in the world of that will¬ 
fulness both of fortune and of our fellows, which not 
because of conscious sinfulness, nor yet because of any 
obviously necessary discord of motives, but because of 
mere brute accident or stupidity, tears to pieces whatever 
is spiritual, kills our infant children, leaves our unrecog¬ 
nized heroes to die neglected and ineffective, sunders the 
wounded hearts of faithful lovers, makes brother war with 
brother, plunges society into bitter confusions, defeats 
over and over the most sacred ideals. My friend some¬ 
times even used this fateful fact of defeat, I remember, 
as a sort of test of the spirituality of things. Were they 
good, he said, willfulness would assail them the more 
surely. Once, when he was a little weary because of the 
hatred that he had met with during some of his under¬ 
takings in a very good cause, I said to him, by way of 
a sort of conventional comfort and of friendly admonition 
at once, “ Why do you work so hard as you do for the 
good of people who only misunderstand you after all? 
They don’t deserve the good things that you offer, for 
they are people who won’t and can’t appreciate your 
trouble. Why cast pearls before swine ? They only turn 
and rend you.” “ Ah, Royce,” replied my friend, “ but 
one does n’t quite surely know that they were pearls that 
he cast until he feels the tusks.” 

But perhaps you will say that, thus put, the problem of 
the stupidity of our human nature and of our fortune 
seems a rather sentimental problem, after all. Is not this 
capriciousness of life simply part of its painfulness ? Is 
it manly to lament just this woe so deeply? I answer, to 
the enlightened soul it is n’t ever so much the painful¬ 
ness as the blind irrationality of fortune that seems to 
drive God out of our thoughts when we look at our world. 


468 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


Mere pain can be borne, for cause, very fairly. One may 
whine, but one can still hold out to the end and not la¬ 
ment it when it is once over. But this capriciousness of 
life is what really makes it seem like an evil dream. 
Consider once more that horror involved in hereditary 
disease, and in the fatal and unearned baseness which 
often goes therewith. Consider the way in which the 
wrong-doing of one person often entails not the physical 
pain, but the utter and inevitable corruption and end¬ 
less moral degradation of another. Consider how not 
mere disloyalty, but a transient mistake, may wreck the 
most spiritual of causes, after years of devotion have 
built up its fortunes nearly to the heights of success. 
These, alas ! are the mere commonplaces of our temporal 
order. Is it easy to say that these things are needed as a 
part of the gravity of the spiritual world ? No, for they 
don’t make the world spiritually grave ! They make it 
rather insane and contemptible. Moral evil in the willful 
sinner himself, you can look in the face and defy, and that 
too even if you are yourself the sinner. Here, you can 
say, is my natural foe; I know what he is and wherefore 
he is. I condemn him, and I rejoice in defeating him. 
But the hopeless and helpless degradation of the sinner’s 
passive victim, how shall you speak comfortably or even 
defiantly after that ? Here is the place only for pity; 
and in a world that is full of such things, and that always 
will be full of such things, so long as its order is the prey 
of the mechanical accidents of nature, where is there 
room for anything but pity for its worthlessness ? 

Well, here indeed we find the enemy of whose works 
Shakespeare wrote in the sonnet that begins 

“ Tired of all these, for restful death I cry.” 

And this will always be the cry of our darker moments so 
long as the tragedies of our world decline to appear to us 
as mainly moral tragedies. Nay, if it were only our sin 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 469 

that kept us from God, might men not often hope to see 
his face ? The true devil is n’t crime, then, but brute 
chance. For this devil teaches us to doubt and grow cold 
of heart; he denies God everywhere and in all his crea¬ 
tures, makes our world of action, that was to be a spirit¬ 
ual tragedy, too often a mere farce before our eyes. And 
to see this farcical aspect of the universe is for the first 
time to come to a sense of the true gloom of life. 


VI. 

Well, then, if this is the final and deepest truth of pes¬ 
simism, what comfort still remains for one who in hope¬ 
less affliction, or in the chaos of defeated spirituality, still 
looks to the truth for aid ? Surely concerning this sort of 
doubt one can only speak in the tenderest and most re¬ 
spectful of terms. Cowards shrink from the petty pains 
of fortune ; sinners and sentimentalists want to get rid of 
the penalties of sin ; but they who most lament and won¬ 
der over this capricious irrationality of the world are just 
the noblest and gentlest of souls, who would pause at no 
heroism were its warfare only a significant one, who would 
shrink from no pang, if only by enduring it one served 
God; but who cannot endure this weary dwelling cheek 
by jowl with the mocking demons of chance and absurd¬ 
ity. Well, can one still plausibly insist that somehow, 
in fashions unknown to us, the infinite Self is strong 
enough to make the facing and the endurance of even 
these demons somehow significant? Can our chance be 
by any possibility his rationality ; our chaos his order, our 
farce his tragedy, our horror his spirituality? Yes, even 
this may come home to us if we remember that he at 
least, in his absoluteness, does not find these things as 
foreign facts, forced upon him from without. He endures 
them, as we do; he condemns them as we must; but he 
knows them, as we in our finitude cannot. And so, if 
knowing them he wills these horrors for himself, must he 


470 THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 

not know wherefore ? In our strength we cannot walk 
when we face them. Can we not walk in his strength ? He 
who solves all problems, shall he not solve this one also ? 
And thus, indeed, if in our finitude we have but one com¬ 
fort, surely we have that. From our finite point of view 
there is no remotely discoverable justification for this 
caprice. This is to our eyes no embodiment of a stern 
moral order. It is Satan’s own irresistible and mocking 
presence in our life. He ought not to be here; yet no 
thing that we can do will have any chance to remove 
him. And so, indeed, were our insight into the truth of 
the Logos based upon any sort of empirical assurance, it 
would surely fail us here. But now, as it is, if we have 
the true insight of deeper idealism, we can turn from 
our chaos to him, who is our own true and divine self, and 
can hear from him with absolute assurance this one word: 
“ O ye who despair, I grieve with you. Yes, it is I who 
grieve in you. Your sorrow is mine. No pang of your 
finitude but is mine too. I suffer it all, for all things are 
mine; I bear it, and yet I triumph.” This word of the 
Self, I say, we can be sure of, for it is the one final word 
of our whole idealistic insight. It is this thought of the 
suffering God, who is just our own true self, who actually 
and in our flesh bears the sins of the world, and whose 
natural body is pierced by the capricious wounds that hate¬ 
ful fools inflict upon him — it is this thought, I say, that 
traditional Christianity has in its deep symbolism first 
taught the world, but that, in its fullness, only an ideal¬ 
istic interpretation can really and rationally express. 
Were not the Logos our own fulfillment, were he other 
than our own very flesh, were he a remote god, were he not 
our own selves in unity, were he foreign to the horror and 
to the foolishness of our chaotic lives, we should indeed 
look to him in vain ; for then his eternal peace would be 
indifference and cruelty, his perfection would be our de¬ 
spair, his loftiness would be our remote and dismal help 


OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, AND THE MORAL ORDER. 471 

lessness. But he is ours, and we are his. He is pierced 
and wounded for us and in us. Our defeats are his ; 
and yet, above time, triumphant in the sacred glory of 
an insight that looks before and after through the endless 
ages and the innumerable worlds, he somehow finds 
amidst all these horrors of time his peace, and so ours. 

“ My peace,” he says, “ I give unto you ; not as the world 
giveth, give I unto you.” This, then, at last, is the true 
realization of the rapt wonder that the mystics sought. 
What in time is hopelessly lost, is attained for him in his 
eternity. 

I know not that I have persuaded you of all this. 
True philosophical persuasion would rest upon something 
much more elaborate than I have had time to present. I 
have only sketched. What I do know is that of such 
truth philosophy must yet some day persuade those who 
are ready to listen and apt to comprehend. Herein, too, 
as I think, are woven into one cord the strands of partial 
knowledge that in our history we have been finding. Spi¬ 
noza and Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Fichte, Kant and 
Hegel, join in suggesting to us our result. Like the pre¬ 
decessors of Childe Roland, they stand at the close of our 
day, ranged along the hillsides to view the end of our 
quest. For herewith, indeed, the task of these lectures is 
ended. We have found in a world of doubt but one assur¬ 
ance—but one, and yet how rich! All else is hypothesis. 
The Logos alone is sure. The brief and seemingly so 
abstract creed of philosophy: u This world is the world 
of the Logos,” has answered our questions in the one 
sense in which w r e can dare to hope for an answer. The 
rest is silence — and, here on the earth, endless labor in 
the might of the spirit, for whom and in whom is all sor¬ 
row and bitterness, and all light and life and peace. 



' 









APPENDIX A. 


Anything resembling an exhaustive bibliography of the topics 
treated in the present book is excluded by the plan of the work. 
A syllabus, with notes, containing a few suggestions for the fur¬ 
ther study of the problems and thinkers considered in the course 
of these lectures, was prepared, was printed in a series of broad¬ 
sides, and was then put into the hands of the hearers on some of 
the occasions of the delivery of the lectures. This syllabus, 
much revised, here follows as an appendix. For its fragmen¬ 
tariness, the nature of the present undertaking may be some 
explanation. It extends to the historical lectures of the course. 
Of the doctrinal lectures it gives only a brief suggestion in a 
single summary statement. 

SYLLABUS. 

The general purposes of this course are : — 

1. To give personal characterizations of some of the more note¬ 
worthy modern thinkers. 

2. To suggest, as clearly as may be possible without technical 
details, something of the nature of their various attitudes towards 
the great concerns and issues of humanity. 

3. To illustrate, in the light of such a study, certain significant 
spiritual problems of our own day. 

LECTURE I. 

INTRODUCTION. 

I. The general business of philosophy. 

II. The variety and seeming failure of the philosophers. 

III. The positive significance of philosophy. 

IV. The many-sidedness of truth. 

Y. The skeptical element in philosophy in its relation to the posi¬ 
tive purpose of the study. 

VI, The limitations of the present undertaking. 



474 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


LECTURE II. 

THE PERIODS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY ; CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 
FIRST PERIOD ; ILLUSTRATION BY MEANS OF THE RELIGIOUS 
ASPECT OF SPINOZISM. 

I. The periods of modern philosophy. 

II. General observations on the first period. 

III. Spinoza as an illustration of the first period ; his fortune and 

character. 

IV. Spinoza’s relation to the problems of religion. Two general 

forms of the religious consciousness distinguished, and illus¬ 
trated from various sources, including the devotional book 
called “ The Imitation of Christ.” 

V. Spinoza possesses one of these two sorts of religious interest, 
but not the other. Parallel between his mysticism and that 
of the “ Imitation.” 

VI. His system as an outcome of his religious interest. His concep¬ 
tion of the Substance, of the Eternal Order, of Body and of 
Mind. Mystical experiences justified by geometrical meth¬ 
ods. 

VTI. Spinoza’s ideal of the wise man and of the love of God. 

Notes. The periods of modern philosophy, as distinguished for the 
present purpose, are: — 

I. Period of Naturalism and of Rationalism: From Galileo to Spinoza. 
[Its specially noteworthy characteristics are, in addition to its general 

interest in outer nature: (1) Its belief that the whole order of nature is 
subject to rigid laws of a mechanical type ; (2) Its faith in the power of 
the human reason to know absolute truth ; and (3) Its fondness for mathe¬ 
matical methods in philosophy.] 

II. Period of the study of the Inner Life : From Locke to Kant. 

[Its general characteristics are : (1) A critical analysis of the powers of 
man’s mind ; (2) A growing skepticism; (3) In the end a tendency towards 
revolutionary reconstructions of all doctrine]. 

III. Period of recent philosophy: From Kant to the present time. 
[Beginning at the culmination of the previous critical period, the third 

period is at first devoted to the study of the inner life, but is later led to 
fresh efforts to comprehend outer nature. It is throughout much influ¬ 
enced by natural science and by the newer study of history. In conse¬ 
quence it develqps the idea of evolution. Its problem is the synthesis and 
reconciliation of our knowledge of outer nature with our understanding of 
the inner life of man.] 

The principal dates of Spinoza’s life are as follows: birth, 1632 ; ex- 
communication from synagogue, 1656; first philosophic work ( Principles 
of Cartesian Philosophy) published, 1663; Theologico-Political Tractate 


APPENDIX A. 


475 


published 1670; refusal of a call to a professorship in Heidelberg-, 1673 ; 
death, 1677. Spinoza’s principal treatise is the Ethics , published posthu¬ 
mously in 1677. He lived first in Amsterdam, then in various minor Dutch 
towns, and died at the Hag-ue. 

His principal works have been recently translated into English in Bohn’s 
Philosophical Library, in two volumes. The best accounts and commenta¬ 
ries in English are those of Pollock ( Spinoza's Life and Philosophy , Lon¬ 
don, 1880), Martineau ( Study of Spinoza), and John Caird ( Spinoza , Edin¬ 
burgh, 1888). The best complete edition is that of Van Vloten and Land 
(The Hague, 1882-83, 2 vols.). 

For comparison are added the dates of several other early modern think- 


ers. 

Montaigne 

1533-1592 

Jakob Boehme 

1575-1624 

Giordano Bruno 

1548-1600 

Hobbes 

1588-1679 

Bacon 

1561-1626 

Descartes 

1596-1650 

Galileo 

1564-1641 

Pascal 

1623-1662 

Campanella 

1568-1639 

Locke 

1632-1704 

Kepler 

1571-1630 

Malebranche 

1638-1715 


LECTURE III. 

THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE ; — FROM SPINOZA TO 

KANT. 

Introductory characterization of this period as one of analysis, 
skepticism, and study of the Inner Life. 

I. Value of skepticism in philosophy. 

II. The problem concerning Innate Ideas ; its origin and early 
stages in modern discussion. 

III. Locke’s treatment of the question : historical consequences of 

the controversy, direct and indirect ; its value for the study 
of the Inner Life. 

IV. Berkeley’s idealism. 

V. Hume’s skepticism. 

VI. The transition of Kant 

Locke (1632-1704) has been often edited. A good edition of his Essay 
on the Human Understanding , for purposes of actual study, is the one in 
Bohn’s Philosophical Library, in the edition of his Philosophical Works. 
The best life is that by H. R. Fox Bourne, London and New York, 1876, 
2 vols. 

Berkeley was born 1684, died 1753. He matriculated at Trinity Col- 
lege, Dublin, in 1700, took his Master’s degree in 1707, published his 
Essay towards a New Theory of Vision in 1709, and his Treatise concerning 
the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710. From 1729 to 1731 he lived 


476 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


in Rhode Island, planning his university, which was to be established in 
the Bermudas. The plan came to nothing. In 1732, returned to Eng¬ 
land, he published his Alciphron. He became bishop of Cloyne in 1734. 
The best recent edition of his works is that of Fraser (Oxford, 1871). The 
same editor has also written his life, published at the same time as the 
works. 

Hume was born in Edinburgh, 1711, died 1776. His History of England 
appeared in 1754^1762. His first philosophical treatise, the Treatise on 
Human Nature , was written between 1734 and 1737. His Essays appeared 
in 1748. The philosophical works have been edited in four volumes by 
Green and Grose, London, 1874-75. On this whole period one may read 
Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century . 

LECTURE IV. 

KANT. 

I. Difficulties of the study of Kant. 

II. Kant’s person and character. 

III. Kant’s religious views, and his early philosophical develop¬ 
ment, in outline. 

IY. His doctrine of Space and of Time. 

V. His doctrine as to the Laws of Nature. 

VI. The Moral Law as the central truth in Kant’s world. 

Kant was born in 1724; received his appointment as professor in the 
university of his native city, Konigsberg (in far eastern Prussia), in 1770; 
published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781; published his own prin¬ 
cipal works between this year and 1798; and died in 1804. The best 
English translation of the Critique is that of Max Miiller. The transla¬ 
tion in Bohn’s Library, by Meiklejohn, is now regarded as superseded. 
Watson’s Selections from Kant (Macmillans, 1886), Wallace’s Kant , in 
Blackwood’s Philosophical Library (Edinburgh and Philadelphia, 1882), 
Edward Caird’s Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (2d ed., New York, 
Macmillans, 1889, 2 vols.), and J. H. Stirling’s Text-Rook to Kant (New 
York, Putnams, 1882), are the best aids to the study of Kant in English. 
The German literature on the subject is enormous, embracing some hun¬ 
dreds of works. 

BRIEF OUTLINE SUMMARY OF KANT’S DOCTRINE. 

1. The origin of Kant’s philosophy is the problem of human reason as 
the eighteenth century had developed this problem. The problem was, 
How can the truth which not only theology, but also common sense and 
natural science, pretend to know about our world, be defended against 
skepticism ? Our human powers being once for all so limited, how can any 
genuine truth of any sort be known ? 

2. Kant’s first answer is: Things in themselves are of necessity unknown 


APPENDIX A. 


477 


to us. We can know in a theoretical sense only the things that appear to 
our senses, that is, the Phenomena of the World of Show. Neither com¬ 
mon sense, nor science, nor theology, can, with theoretical assurance, carry 
us beyond the world as it seems to our human powers of observation and 
experience. 

3. In particular, Space and Time can be shown to be mere forms of our 
human sense-consciousness, and to have no relation to things in them¬ 
selves. The unknowable real world without us exists, therefore, neither 
in space nor in time. We know not how this world exists at all; we only 
recognize that it exists. 

4. But we can nevertheless be sure that our world of seeming things in 
space and time must conform to rigid laws, such as the law of causation. 
For our active understanding, in thinking our world, is bound by its own 
nature, in order to preserve, as it were, our very sanity (or, as Kant would 
say, the Unity of our Self-Consciousness), to regard all observed facts as 
conforming to laws. Yet these laws of Nature, which science studies, are 
the very creation of our own understanding acting upon the data of our 
senses. Such laws are not the laws of the unknowable real world at all. 
They hold only for the show-world of our experience. Our own under¬ 
standing is, therefore, the source for us of all knowable rational truth. 

5. Yet, ignorant as we are of all absolute truth, confined as we are for 
all theoretical knowledge to the seeming world of sense and understanding 
in space and time, we are yet morally bound to postulate that the real 
world of the things in themselves is a Divine Moral Order; that is, we are 
bound to act as if such a real and absolute moral order were known to us 
to exist. 

6. In this way we are theoretically certain that the seeming world is a 
world of orderly law, such as common sense and science believe in ; and we 
are practically certain that the unknown real world is a divine and moral 
world, because it is our duty to treat that unknown world as if it were 
divine and moral. 

LECTURE Y. 

FICHTE. 

I. Restatement of Kant’s general significance in modern thought. 

II. A possible transformation of Kant’s world : First statement of 

the Idealism common to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and of 
its relations to Christianity. 

III. Fichte’s fortunes and character. 

IV. and Y. Fichte’s Subjective Idealism. 

YI. His book on the “ Vocation of Man.” 

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in 1762, was a student in Leipzig and 
Jena from 1780 to 1784, was private tutor thereafter, and lived in great 
poverty, until 1794, when he was called to a professorship in Jena, as a 
result of his first book, published in 1792. In 1799 he was removed from 


478 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


his professorship on a charge of atheism, but was later active, as professor, 
at the new University of Berlin, until his death in 1814. His publications 
were numerous. Of his best works the most popular, translated by Wil¬ 
liam Smith, have been published in several editions by Triibner & Co. (3d 
ed., London, 1873, in one vol.). On this whole period, in its general as¬ 
pects, a very useful book, is the German, is the History of Literature by 
Julian Schmidt. 

LECTURE VI. 

THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY. 

Introductory summary of Kant and Fichte : — 

I. The arbitrary element in Fichte’s doctrine, and the relation 
of this arbitrariness to the Romantic School and to the doc¬ 
trines of our day. 

II. The place of the Romantic School in German literature. 
Wider and narrower use of the term Romantic School. 
Characteristics of the principal members of the Romantic 
School proper. 

III. Illustrations of the Romantic view of life : Friedrich Schlegel 

and Novalis. 

IV. Schelling and Caroline. Sketch of some of Schelling’s views. 

Concerning the Romantic School, on the literary side, the reader must 
be referred to the bibliographies of German literature. The well-known 
early essays of Carlyle form here an introduction which has not yet lost its 
value for English readers ; and his translations are of permanent worth. 
Heine’s sketches of the History of German Thought and Literature are as 
suggestive as they are charming and untrustworthy. Schelling’s volumi¬ 
nous writings are still for the most part accessible only in the original. 
The best recent technical and critical exposition of a portion of his doc¬ 
trine is that by Professor John Watson, Schelling's Transcendental Ideal¬ 
ism (Chicago, 1882). 

For comparison are added a number of biographical dates, in both Ger¬ 
man and English Literature : — 


Herder 

BORN 

1744 

Tieck 

BORN 

1773 

Goethe 

1749 

Schelling 

1775 

Schiller 

1759 

Schopenhauer 

1788 

Fichte 

1762 

Wordsworth 

1770 

A. W. Schlegel 

1767 

Scott 

1771 

Schleiermacher 

1768 

Coleridge 

1772 

Hegel 

1770 

Southey 

1774 

Friedrich Schlegel 

1772 

Byron 

1788 

Novalis 

1772 

Shelley 

1792 


APPENDIX A. 


479 


LECTURE VII. 

HEGEL. 

I. Schelling’s doctrine of Identity. 

II. Hegel’s character and attitude. 

III. The paradox of Self-consciousness. 

IV. Systematic application of the paradox. 

Hegel was born in 1770 at Stuttgart, studied at the University of Tubin¬ 
gen, was private tutor from 1793 to 1800, was docent at Jena from 1801 
until after the battle of Jena, was gymnasium director at Niirnberg from 
1808 until 1816, was then made professor at Heidelberg, and from 1818 
until his death, in 1831, was professor at Berlin. His works, including 
many very unevenly edited notes of his academic lectures, were published 
by his pupils in eighteen volumes (1832-45), and his son has recently added 
as nineteenth volume his letters. His life was written admiringly by Karl 
Rosenkranz (1844), and reviewed, together with his system, with much 
severity of criticism, by Haym ( Hegel und seine Zeit, 1857). Since Haym’s 
book and Trendelenburg’s keen criticism of the dialectic method in his 
Logische Studien (2d ed.» 1862, 3d ed., 1870), the Hegelian doctrine has 
received less and less attention in Germany, although its indirect and un¬ 
consciously effective influence has been great. On the other hand, in Great 
Britain, Dr. Hutchinson Stirling’s Secret of Hegel (London, 1865), one of 
the most waywardly constructed of remarkable philosophical books, began 
(through its very skillful exposition of some features of Hegel’s thought) 
a movement that has given Hegel first-class importance for recent specula¬ 
tion. Wallace’s Logic of Hegel, and Caird’s Life of Hegel, in Black¬ 
wood’s Philosophical Series, are important introductions to the study of the 
philosopher. Mr. W. T. Harris’s Hegel's Logic, in Grigg’s Philosophical 
Classics, is a scholarly exposition of a highly technical sort. 

LECTURE VIII. 

SCHOPENHAUER. 

I. The significance of Pessimism. 

II. The general character of Schopenhauer’s system. 

III. Schopenhauer’s person, fortunes, and quality. 

IV. Summary of his principal treatise. 

V. Estimate of Schopenhauer’s doctrine. 

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788, published the first volume of 
his principal work in 1818, made in 1820 an effort to succeed as docent at 
Berlin, but failing here, lived as wanderer and recluse until his death at 
Frankfort in 1860. The recent expiration of the copyright upon his works 
(published in six volumes by Brockhaus) has led to many reprints of part 


480 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


or all of his writings. His philosophy is best expounded by himself, and 
so fine a master of style should be read in his own tongue, although he is 
now extremely accessible in English translations. His two biographers, 
Frauenstadt and Gwinner (the latter’s Schopenhauer's Leben , published in 
1878, is the best), have told the story of his eccentric career with much 
detail. Very useful is Wallace’s Life of Arthur Schopenhauer (London, 
Great Writers series, 1890). 

LECTURE IX. 

THE RISE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 

I. The return to the outer order initiated by Schopenhauer. 

II. The Romantic School in its relation to historical science. 

III. The Historical School and the idea of evolution. 

IV. The problems of the doctrine of Evolution. 

V. Empiricism, skepticism, and philosophy. 

VI. The position of Mr. Herbert Spencer. 

VII. The Monistic movement. 

VIII. Outlook towards a positive creed. 

LECTURES X. TO XIII. 

GENERAL SUMMARY OF THE POSITIVE LECTURES OF THE COURSE. 

I. The positive lectures discuss : (1) The general cosmological 
problems connected with certain aspects of the doctrine of Evolution 
(Lecture X.) ; (2) The general doctrine of Idealism as the result of 
the historical movement that the previous lectures have traced, and 
as the fundamental doctrine of philosophy (Lecture XI.) ; (3) The 
application of the doctrine of idealism to the explanation of the fun¬ 
damental problems of science, in so far as they concern the relations 
between natural law and moral freedom, and between the inner life 
and the external world (Lecture XII.) ; and (4) The concluding 
discussion of the moral and religious issues that centre about the pro¬ 
blem of optimism and pessimism (Lecture XIII.). 

II. The doctrine of idealism itself has two portions, here called 
respectively Analytic Idealism (the doctrine with which the name of 
Berkeley is especially associated), and Synthetic Idealism (or the 
doctrine of the universal self as the world thinker). 

III. It is the province of analytic idealism to show, by a study of 
the elements whereof all our beliefs consist, that, in case the real 
world is to be knowable at all, it must be, in its deepest nature, a 
world of ideas, that is, of facts that can only exist for minds. Id. 
other words, the knowable world is, only in so far as beings with 
minds actually know it to be. 


APPENDIX A. 


481 


IV. There remains the alternative, however, that the real world is 
existent as something essentially unknowable (as, for instance, Mr. 
Herbert Spencer asserts). This doctrine is considered in Lecture 
XI. and is there set aside. 

V. A final objection to the whole foregoing argument for idealism 
appears, in case one asserts that, after all, nobody ever does truly 
know any reality beyond his own self, so that our previous discussion 
is helpless as against a stubborn skepticism, which doubts every pos¬ 
sible assertion about reality. 

VI. To this it is finally answered that the objection is in one sense 
as well founded as it is imperfectly understood by those who regard 
it as a truly skeptical objection. Properly regarded, this very asser¬ 
tion, that beyond the self no truth is knowable, brings to fulfillment 
our synthetic idealism, by showing us that there is but one self in the 
world, namely, the Logos or world-mind. The finite self knows truth 
beyond its own limitations, just because it is an organic part of the 
complete Self. 

VII. The doctrine of idealism once thus discussed in its abstract¬ 
ness, the remaining argument depends throughout on the thought 
that only experience can give us any clue to the contents and the 
actual world of this world-mind, and that idealism is in no sense a 
doctrine of illusion, or one which leaves finite selves to their own 
caprices. Idealism demands (1) That we should interpret experi¬ 
ence in terms of the doctrine of the world-mind ; but that (2) We 
should depend upon experience for the revelation of that truth which, 
for us finite beings, must remain a fast “ outer” truth, just because 
it is the content of other mind than our own bits of selfhood, and is 
universally true for all intelligences. 

VIII. The problem of the philosophy of experience is, then, to 
distinguish between what is really “outer” and what is “inner” 
about our finite experience, that is, between “facts,” and our private 
point of view about the facts. 

IX. The world of outer experience is then the world of Facts. But 
what is a fact ? It appears to be something, in the first place, that 
one must describe , in some sort of universal terms, in order to get at 
the truth of it. The principle of ordinary realism is, that you must 
not be sentimental or otherwise emotional in your account of the 
truth of things, but rather exact in your descriptions of what things 
are. And this principle has a thoroughly idealistic justification. Not 
Appreciation, then, but Description shall give you outer truth. 
This is the characteristic presupposition of all natural science. And 
descriptive thinking is such as seizes on universal aspects of things, 
as opposed to momentary and transient aspects. 


482 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


X. But what does this presupposition involve ? In the first place, 
as developed in the work of science, the presupposition involves the 
assumption that the world is essentially describable. But one can only 
describe, in general terms, the well-knit, the orderly, that which con¬ 
forms to Law. Hence science assumes the universality and rigidity 
of the laws of nature. And because the most exact descriptions are 
possible only in case of processes of a mechanical type, such as go on 
in Space and in Time, science assumes that all things are a part of 
nature’s mechanism. Man too, from this point of view is a thing 
amongst things, a product of nature, with a nervous mechanism, but 
without free will. 

XI. Yet this point of view is as inadequate as it is partially true. 
For a closer analysis shows that one can only describe what has first 
been appreciated, that there therefore must be universal types of 
appreciation, and that in consequence Ideals must be deeper than 
Mechanism, so that, in order to be relatively describable, nature 
must embody purposes, and so be possessed of worth. 

XII. With this result we return to our idealism, which is now 
enriched by the thought that the Natural Order must also be a 
Moral Order, that the world of the absolute Self must appear to 
us as having two aspects, one a temporal, the other an eternal aspect, 
one of Law and one of Worth. Man then turns out to be at once 
a part >f nature’s mechanism, and a part of the Moral Order ; at 
once temporally determined and morally free. 

XIII. It is this consideration that in the concluding lecture leads 
to special suggestions as to the problem of evil. 


APPENDIX B. 


ON KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION OF THE 
CATEGORIES. 

The statement of the spirit of the Deduction in my text, page 
126 sqq., is confessedly a paraphrase of only a few of the cen¬ 
tral thoughts of this extremely intricate doctrine. A recent edi¬ 
tor of the “ Kritik,” Erich Adickes, 1 has shown, in a fashion 
which I find on the whole very convincing, that the very difficult 
deduction of the first edition is in fact a piecemeal combination 
of a number of independent lines of argument which Kant must 
have written down at decidedly different times during the years 
1772-80. 2 As to what, notwithstanding the variety and the 
diverse origin of Kant’s different trains of thought in this deduc¬ 
tion, is the most important outcome of the whole, opinions have 
of course differed widely. But Falckenberg, in his “ Geschichte 
d. neueren Philosophic,” 3 has stated the general and ultimate 

1 Immanuel Kant's “ Kritik der reinen Vernunft," mit einer Einleitung 
und Anmerkungen , hrsg. v. Dr. Erich Adickes. Berlin, 1889. 

2 Op. cit. page 683, note: ‘ ‘ Ira vorhergehenden habe ich nachzuweisen 
versucht, dass was man bisher im allgemeinen fur eine einheitliche gross- 
artige Konception hielt, vielmehr als eine mosaikartige Zusammenstellung 
und Verschlingung verschiedener Gedanken aus verschiedenen Zeitenanzu- 
sehen ist.” The view here carried out by Adickes with very great critical 
ingenuity, was suggested in a general way as early as 1878 by Benno Erd¬ 
mann, in his book, Kant's Kriticismus in der ersten und in der zweiten 
Aujlage der “ Kritik der reinen Vernunft ,” on page 25. The notion is to-day 
rendered an inevitable one by a combination of the internal evidence of 
the text of the first edition with the evidence as to Kant’s method of work 
presented in Erdmann’s edition of the Refexionen , and in Reicke’s Lose 
Blatter. As to some of the special results of Adickes, opinions will of 
course differ. 

8 Pages 268, 269, 272, note 3. “ Ein doppeltes ist was nach Kant ausser- 
halb der Vorstellung des Individuums existiert. (1) Die unbekannten 
Dinge an sich. ... (2) Die Erscheinungen selbst, mit ihren erkennbaren 
immanenten Gesetzen. . . . Die Dinge u. Ereignisse der Erseheinungswelt 


484 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


result of the Kantian argument as to the reality and the consti¬ 
tution of the world of the objects of our human knowledge, in a 
fashion that, as I hold, correctly represents what is, for the fully 
developed Kant, the most important thing to be proved in the 
Deduction and in its related arguments. According to Falcken- 
berg, namely, the final view of Kant is that one must distinguish 
between my subjective, or momentary consciousness, and my 
ueberindividuelles transcendentales Bewusstsein, which is equi¬ 
valent to die menschliche Gattungsvernunft. 1 This latter it is 
which gets its sense data from the unknown Binge an sich, 
which applies the categories to these sense-data, which gives the 
“ laws ” to “ nature,” whichi constitutes the world of “ objects,” 
which makes these objects independent of my momentary con¬ 
sciousness, which distinguishes them from the subjehtive Vorstel- 
litngen of the empirisches Bewusstsein , and which at the same 
time secures a complete agreement between the subjective Vor- 
stellungen and the eine Erfahrung , or the universal experience 
wherein all sane human beings agree. This then is the out¬ 
come of the completed Kantian doctrine, separated from all the 
dross of imperfect and frequently inconsistent comments, expla¬ 
nations, and proofs, with which, especially in the first edition, 
he confused it. This it is which the Deduction is above all to 
prove. This is that notion of the one Self, constitutive of the 
one true experience, which Kant introduced to philosophy, and 
which only the peculiar limitations of his personal point of view 
prevented him from developing further in the direction in which 
the post-Kantian thinkers continued the progress of thought. 
While, as I have said, this seems to me, in the light of the most 
recent results of “ Kant-philology,” indubitably the true outcome 
of Kant’s study concerning the nature and objectivity of truth for 

existieren sowohl vor als nach meiner Wahrnehmung, sind etwas von mei- 
ner subjektiven und momentanen Vorstellung derselben verschiedenes.” 
“ Was ausserhalb meines gegenwartigen Bewusstseins ist, ist deshalb noch 
nicht ausser allem menschlichen Bewusstsein.” 

1 Op. cit. page 269. Die Erscheinung, says Falekenberg, is for Kant 
something that stands between the absolute object, the Ding an sich, and 
the SubjeJct , deren gemeinschaftliches Product es ist , as a sort of relatives 
Ding an sich. On p. 139 of my text I myself have pointed out how much 
Kant’s unity of self-consciousness tended towards the later interpretation of 
Fichte and others. 


APPENDIX B. 


485 


us men, the fact of course remains that in the “ Kritik ” there 
are very many passages which not only bear but require a less 
developed and less consistent, as well as a more subjective inter¬ 
pretation. These passages content themselves with saying that, 
while the Binge an sich are and remain unknowable, we, lim¬ 
ited to our Vorstellungen as we are, actually do apply our cate¬ 
gories to the world of the Vorstellungen , because it is our nature 
to do so ; 1 and so we build up the world of the Erscheinungen 
by a process of binding Empfindungen together through the 
instrumentality of the categories, thus creating objects which 
are themselves nothing but our own private Vorstellungen . 
From this less advanced and subjective point of view the dif- 
erence between my empirisches or subjektives Bewusstsein and 
my transcendentales Bewusstsein , that is, my total self, would 
become at best merely a quantitative, not a qualitative differ¬ 
ence. For, from this point of view, at each moment I apply 
my categories. My Gemuth is of such a nature that I must do 
so. By this application I get, in the world of each moment, 
a categorized object. The object thus gained is itself nothing 
but my Vorstellung, existent here and now. My whole expe¬ 
rience consists of the numerous moments of my life; and since 
each moment is categorized, the whole series must be. If one 
asks why I have a right thus to categorize my moments of expe¬ 
rience, the only answer is that my experiences are my own, and 
may be treated as my own nature determines. If one asks 
why I thus categorize in each moment the experiences thereof, 
the only answer is, that otherwise I could not think them. If 
one still asks why could I not think otherwise, the only reply 
is that such is the nature of my thought. The product of the 
moment thus remains subjective ; there is nothing objective but 
the Bmge an sich, and they are unknowable. 

Kant’s doctrine, stated in this second and purely subjective 
fashion, is the doctrine that many interpreters have found in 
his book, as the main outcome of the Analytik. If, as I have 
stated, it is not his final view, why, one may ask, does it often 
seem so prominent in the Deduction and elsewhere, especially in 

1 Falckenberg recognizes and briefly summarizes these inconsistent pas¬ 
sages on p. 270 and 271, op. cit. 


486 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


the first edition ? Why, again, if this was the case, and Kant’s 
true doctrine was not this second one, did he fail to perceive the 
consequences of the assumption of the difference between the 
empirisches and the transcendentales Bewusstsein ? Why did 
he leave the inconsistent passages standing ? Why did he not 
proceed further on the road towards the later idealism ? 

These questions can only be answered by a reference to the 
now so well-known but peculiarly complex conditions of Kant’s 
own development. He took no definite step forwards until he 
was forced to do so. He unconsciously preferred inconsistency 
to any dangerous symmetry and dogmatism of statement. His 
own doctrine of an objektive Einheit des Bewusstseins , equiva¬ 
lent substantially to what Falckenberg calls die menschliche 
Gattungsvernunft , was of extremely slow and consequently 
imperfect growth in his mind. There was a stage of his critical 
philosophy in which he certainly did not yet hold it. He 
worked with wonderful patience and conscientiousness. He 
builded far better than he knew. An unconsciousness as to 
his own consequences remained to the end a peculiar charac¬ 
teristic of his mind and his method. Therefore, although it is 
indeed our privilege to-day to understand Kant (if one may 
borrow again his own often quoted words) besser als er sich sel - 
ber verstand, a brief popular summary of his Deduction must 
limit itself to a comparatively neutral statement of his views. 

The present is no place for any lengthy discussion of Kant- 
philology. I must confine myself, therefore, to a few mere 
references and statements concerning the real outcome and the 
gradual development of the Kantian doctrine. 

The best recent discussion of the whole matter of the relation 
of empirisches and transcendentales Bewusstsein is, so far as 
I can see, the admirable study by Vaihinger, Zu Kant's Wider - 
legung des Idealismus, 1 a paper wholly free from any effort to 
read a falsely consistent meaning into Kant’s complex doctrine 
of the nature of “ objectivity,” but still seriously devoted to 
demonstrating what was the actual tendency of Kant’s growing 
thought. Vaihinger stands side by side with Benno Erdmann 

1 Published in the Strassburger Abhandlungen zur Philosophic (Freiburg 
u. Tubingen, 1884), pp. 87-164. 


APPENDIX B. 


487 


as one of the two highest authorities at present concerning 
Kant’s growth and teaching. Both these scholars are thorough 
philologists, cautious, elaborate, patient, and at the same time 
capable of broad outlooks and wide generalizations. This pres¬ 
ent paper of Vaihinger’s is in his best mood. His principal re¬ 
sult is the statement and explanation of the remarkable thesis: 1 
“ From Kant’s fundamental assumptions follows necessarily the 
existence of a physical world independent of our [subjective] 
ideas.” Surprising as this notion must seem to those who inter¬ 
pret their Kant in a purely subjective fashion, it is not only true 
that Kant stated this thesis in so many words in the famous 
Refutation of Idealism, of the second edition, but it is also 
true, as Vaihinger shows, and as all intelligent readers of the 
“ Kritik ” must in the end come to recognize, that this doctrine 
is, despite all of Kant’s hesitancy and inconsistencies, the deep¬ 
est expression of the genuine spirit of the whole “ Kritik.’^ 
Nor is this principle of the real objectivity of Kant’s physical 
world at all opposed to the other equally fundamental thesis of 
Kant, namely, the thesis that, as I have stated the matter on 
page 34 of my text, “ Man’s nature is the real creator of man’s 
world,” so that “ it is the inner structure of the human spirit 
which merely expresses itself in the visible nature about us.” 
For Kant’s most important metaphysical deed lies precisely in 
his distinction of the private or subjective personality proper 
from the universally human and therefore genuine selfhood, and 
in his reference of the phenomena and laws of outer nature in 
space and time to the constructive and objectively categorizing 
activity of the latter, that is, to the relatively universal Unity 
of Apperception. Hereby he prepared the way for the further 
universalizing of this human selfhood into the notion of the 
World-Self of objective idealism, — the highest and deepest 
result of all modern philosophy. “ I ” exist, for Kant, in a 
twofold sense. I am here and now in the world as this suc¬ 
cession of flying moments, this empirisches Bewusstsein. But I 
also exist in another way ; I have objeJctive Einheit der Apper¬ 
ception, and to this objektive Einheit I, as empirical subject, 

1 Op. cit. p. 140: “ Aus Kant’s fundamentalen Annahmen folget noth- 
wendig die Existenz einer von der Vorstellung unabhangigen Korperwelt” 


488 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


must submit. Now this objektive Einheit is something essen¬ 
tially human. “ We ” possess it together. “ Es gibt nur eine 
Erfahrung .” 1 It is the objektives Subjekt of this higher expe¬ 
rience who is affected somehow by the unknowable Dinge an 
sich, who applies the categories to his Empfindungen , and who 
thus gives laws to nature. For me, as private subject, these 
laws are outer, these categorized things are objective and un¬ 
changeable. Meanwhile, I, as private subject, can still know 
these outer things because, although they are independent of 
my momentary caprice, they are not independent of my deeper, 
of my genuinely human personality. I, even in the privacy of 
the moment, share in the nature of the objektive Einheit , repeat 
its activity, reconstruct its original constructions, join my tran¬ 
sient to my deeper selfhood, and am thus, by implication, more 
than my purely subjective self. 

Yaihinger’s philological demonstration of the foregoing inter¬ 
pretation of Kant’s outcome will be all the more convincing to 
the reader in view of the fact that Vaihinger himself is quite 
free from all suspicion of any predisposition to force an “ He¬ 
gelian” interpretation, or any absolutely idealistic tendencies 
upon Kant. His strictly objective discussion of the fact is, 
therefore, extremely persuasive. I can here only refer to it in 
this general fashion, and must leave the technically skilled 
reader to study it for himself. 

Apart from Yaihinger’s paper, the careful reader of the 
“ Kritik ” will often have pondered over such phrases as refer to 
the difference between the objektive Einheit and the subjektive 
Einheit der Apperception, and over such statements as those in 
the deduction of the principle of causation, in the second Ana¬ 
logy of Experience, where repeatedly the distinction is drawn 

1 In one of the Rejlexionen of Benno Erdmann’s edition, vol. ii. p. 285, 
Kant himself gives this thought an expression that is almost startingly 
near the later formulas of constructive idealism. I refer to Rejl. 989 of 
Erdmann’s arrangement: — “ Dinge werden vorgestellt als Erscheinungen, 
weil es Wesen gibt, die Sinne haben. Dieselben Wesen haben aber auch 
Verstand, unter dessen Gesetzen die Erscheinungen stehen, sofern ihr mog- 
liches Bewusstsein nothwendig zu einem allgemeingiltigen Bewusstsein 
stimmen muss, d. i., sie haben eine Natur.” Yet this note doubtless belongs 
to a time before 1781. 


APPENDIX B. 


489 


between “ subjective succession ” in me , and “ objective se¬ 
quence ” im Gegenstande. The reader will have observed that 
over this distinction Kant himself struggles with an almost 
pathetic earnestness of reflection, that he again and again seeks 
to give it final articulation, and again and again fails, his clear¬ 
est assertions being after all those which approach nearest to 
Vaihinger’s formulation as above, and to the wording of the 
Refutation of Idealism in the second edition. Slowly it will 
dawn upon the reader that Kant is in the birth-throes of bring¬ 
ing forth a new and wonderful reflective notion, whose corre¬ 
spondent in the spiritual faith of humanity is very old, but 
whose existence as a reflective doctrine is highly novel. This 
notion is that of the objectively subjective self | —objective to me 
in my private capacity, but subjectively constructive of the world 
of the standard human experience, in so far as this is the true or 
normal self. Kant does not himself fully know what he is pro¬ 
ducing. He feels the birth throes; he gives forth all sorts of 
uncertain sounds ; he often seems to deny, and in fact does deny 
his own offspring. But none the less is it truly his offspring. 

But the best view of Kant’s relation to the new doctrine we 
get as we read the notes now accessible in Benno Erdmann’s 
“ Reflexionen,” and in Reicke’s “ Lose Blatter.” Here Kant’s 
endlessly patient efforts to deduce ever afresh the categories, his 
wavering between a subjective and an objective interpretation 
of their application, the gradual and for a long time very dim 
appearance of the transcendentale Einheit , Kant’s own final 
obscurity as to whether it really is a conscious and wholly actual 
or complete self at all, his own unconscious hints at the coming 
objective idealism, — all these things are depicted in a fashion 
that makes intelligible to us as never before the piecemeal struc¬ 
ture of the text of the “ Kritik,” the inevitable inconsistencies 
of that great work, and the beautifully conscientious self-re¬ 
straint of the patient Kant himself, who stood on the border of 
the promised land of modern idealism, and could not enter. In 
the light of all this we understand how the thesis of the Refu¬ 
tation of Idealism in the second edition, a thesis which has 
been a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense to numberless 
readers, is in fact one of the most genuinely consistent and 


490 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


idealistic of Kant’s propositions, so that, as Vaihinger declares: 1 
“ Die Anerkennung einer von unseren empirischen Vorstellun- 
gen unabhangigen Korperwelt im Raume, ist eine nothwendige 
und unabweisliche logische Consequenz aus den fundamentalen 
Positionen Kants. Diese Consequenz hat Kant auch gezogen.” 

Yet, of course, there remains the conflict between the con¬ 
sistent Kant who drew his own final conclusions, and the hesi¬ 
tant Kant whose language is often so narrowly subjective. The 
historical fact of this conflict has led me, in my general state¬ 
ment of Kant’s results in my text, to prefer, as I have said, a 
more neutral formulation, which points towards the deeper con¬ 
sequences, but does not expressly embody them. 

It remains, of course, all the while sure that Kant’s urspriing- 
liche or objektive Einheit der Apperception was at its deepest 
never the unity of a true World-Self in any absolute or com¬ 
plete sense. The argument of the Dialectic forbade Kant to 
look for absolute Vollstandigkeit in any direction. Kant’s 
highest principle was at its best, therefore, limited to what 
Falckenherg calls a menschliche Gattungsvernunft. This limi¬ 
tation, meanwhile, was precisely what later thinkers were bound 
to transcend. 

As a fact, therefore, one would give an unhistorical impres¬ 
sion of the true Kant, in all his admirable cautiousness of phrase¬ 
ology, if one took his doctrine of the transcendentales Bewusst - 
sein, as he stated in his most advanced and suggestive discus¬ 
sions, out of its characteristically obscure environment, and set it 
down as not only Kant’s final, but as his whole doctrine. Un¬ 
able in my text to present all the aspects of the argument of the 
Deduction, I have therefore deemed it least misleading to lay 
stress on the relatively neutral and therefore somewhat equivo¬ 
cal statement of his views. I have pointed out how he ap¬ 
pealed to the transcendentale Einheit der Apperception; I 
have pointed out how this Einheit is, for each of us, our true 
self, and how the appeal is constantly made to it by every one 
of us, in so far as he is rational. This notion is so far unques¬ 
tionably Kantian. What I have not pointed out, except inciden¬ 
tally, as in the passage on page 139 of the text, is that the tran- 


1 Op. cit. p. 164. 


APPENDIX B. 


491 


scendentale Einheit der Apperception is in effect what Falcken- 
berg calls it, a menscliliche Gattungsvernunft , and is so already, 
by implication, identical with the Self of later idealists, a Self 
which is only Kant’s transcendentale Einheit writ large. I 
have deliberately left doubtful, in the text, how far Kant’s cate¬ 
gorized world of physical nature is genuinely objective for the 
individual consciousness. The Kant of the final stage of the 
critical philosophy knew that this world is objective for the 
individual, is no product of his empirisches Bewusstsein , is not 
set in order, nor categorized, nor objectified by his momentary 
thinking, but is properly accepted by him as a world of fact. 
The Kant of an earlier stage, while the critical philosophy was 
forming, did not yet hold this view. The Kant of the final 
stage attributed the application of the categories to an ursprilng - 
liche Einheit der Apperception, with which the empirisches 
Bewusstsein is simply bound to agree. The Kant of the earlier 
stage made no clear distinction between empirisches or subjek - 
fives , and objectives or transcendentales Bewusstsein at all. 
But, by reason of that curious fashion of composition which 
Adickes has so well demonstrated in the text of his own edition, 
various stages of the growing critical philosophy are represented 
in the book as it comes before us. And the actual Kant, by 
reason of all the complexity of his marvelous investigation, was 
himself never wholly aware of his own inconsistencies, nor of 
the extent to which they obscured his true thought. 


APPENDIX C. 

THE HEGELIAN THEORY OF UNIVERSALS. 

In the text, pp. 222-226,1 have briefly set forth Hegel’s 
theory as to the reality of the “ concrete ” universal. The one 
true Genus, according to him, is the divine Idee , in which, ac¬ 
cording to Hegel, every genuine individual reality has its organic 
place. This theory of the Organic Universal as the Totalitdt 
containing and determining all the interrelated and true Indi¬ 
viduals, which latter have genuine being only as members of 
the organized body of their Universal, has been shown in the 
text to be a necessary result of the Hegelian metaphysics of 
Self-consciousness. The historical importance of the matter jus¬ 
tifies here the addition of a few citations and references for the 
use of the more technical student. 

The Hegelian theory of Universals is intended, of course, as 
the text has also shown, to offer a solution of the ancient ques¬ 
tion as to the reality of universals. What objective validity have 
our general concepts ? “ They must have validity, they must 

correspond to objective truth,” so some thinkers have said, “ be¬ 
cause all science is of the general, and all science is also of the 
truth.” “They cannot have, as general ideas, objective valid¬ 
ity,” so other thinkers have said, “ because all that truly exists 
in the world is individual. For there is no such thing as dog in 
general. There are in the world only individual dogs. The 
universal, therefore, exists only as realized in the single indi¬ 
vidual.” 

In view of this antinomy of traditional discussion, Hegel 
offers his characteristic solution. The real world is the world 
of the Absolute Self. His truth is organic, is allumfassend , is 
a Totalitdt , and is, in logical formulation, the universal Idee. 
Now the Idee is not an “ abstract universal,” nor a general idea 
that is merely exemplified by the individual objects of the world. 


APPENDIX C. 


493 


On the contrary, they are in it; for in it they live and move 
and have their being; and it, on the other hand, is in them only 
in so far forth as they are first in it. No finite individual, in 
its isolation, embodies the Idee , or corresponds to this true Uni¬ 
versal. Only the organic totality of the finite embodies the 
Universal. And in this sense the Genus is real. Hegel’s 
theory, expressed in his own words, is : — 

“Alles Wirkliche, in sofern es ein Wahres ist, ist die Idee, 
und hat seine Wahrheit allein durch und kraft der Idee. Das 
einzelne Seyn ist irgend eine Seite der Idee; ftir dieses bedarf 
es dalier noch anderer Wirklichkeiten, die gleichfalls als beson- 
ders fur sich bestehende erscheinen ; in ilinen zusammen und in 
ilirer Beziehung ist allein der Begriff realisirt. Das Einzelne 
ftir sich entspriclit seinem Begriffe nicht; diese Bescliranktheit 
seines Daseyns macht seine Endlichkeit und seinen Untergang 
aus.” 1 

To the illustration of this theory it is worth while, however, 
to devote some further space. With his customary manysided¬ 
ness of treatment, Hegel, of course, endeavors to show how 
previous theories of the universal have a relative and historical 
justification as stages on the way to the true insight, and as 
embodiments of lower and partly untrue forms of the universal 
forms, which are presented to us in the phenomenal appear¬ 
ances of the finite world. 

To these lower forms of the universal, Hegel devotes a patient 
and extended attention; and we must first briefly refer to the 
principal one amongst them. 


I. 

In particular, then, Hegel’s theory of Universal cannot be 
understood without a clear distinction between the lower form 
of what he calls Verstandee-Allgemeinheit, and the true or 
higher form of the Vernunft-Allgemeinheit or Allgemeinheit 
des Begriffes. The Understanding, according to Hegel, is the 
first form of the activity of thought. 2 As such it produces, not 
Begriffe in the proper sense at all, but what Hegel technically 

1 The passage here given in full is referred to and in larger part trans¬ 
lated in the text, p. 224. 

2 Encycloped. § 467, Wtrice, vol. vii. 2, p. 355. 


494 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


calls Gedanken} Gedanken of this first sort are the universals 
of the understanding, such ideas as man or house or animal. 
These are often called Begriffe , but wrongly. 2 On this stage 
they are the product of analysis and abstraction ; and abstrac¬ 
tion is as necessary in the beginning of our thinking as it is 
untrue from the higher point of view. It is the very business 
of philosophy to transform Gedanken into Begriffe . 8 The Ge- 
danke, as it is first reached, embodies the universal qualities or 
characteristics present in each of many individuals. Out of 
such individuals it thus makes an abstractly defined class or 
Gattung. This class, or genus of the understanding, is related 
to the sub-classes and individuals that fall within its Umfang in 
the fashion that the Aristotelian logic originally defined. 4 The 
Gattung , namely, has species or Arten, which as subordinate 
classes are subsumed under it, forming each a part of its Um¬ 
fang , while the individuals are in their turn subsumed under the 
various Arten. Both Gattung and Art, for this stage of thinking, 
express only das Gemeinsame found in each and all of many 
individuals. In experience, meanwhile, only the individuals can 
be shown, not the Gattung. For the Gattung is not yet the 
Begriff, which will turn out to be much more than ein Ge- 
meinschaftliches. This Gattung of the understanding has no 
Existenz. For it is thus far, on its subjective side, the Gedanke 
of the observer, which, being formal, does not explain either 

1 Phanomenol., Werke, vol. ii. pp. 24-25. 

2 Encyclop., Werke, vol. vi. p. 324. 

3 Phanomenol., Werke , vol. ii. p. 26. On the definition of the Verstand, 
see, also, Werke, vol. vii. 2, p. 356. The understanding is there “ formal.” 
Its activity depends upon Abstrahiren. “ Trennt er das Zufallige vom We- 
sentlichen ab, so ist er durchaus in seinem Rechte und erscheint als Das 
was er in Wahrheit seyn soil.” Das Wesentliche, so abstracted, the under¬ 
standing uses to define its universals. 

4 “Aristoteles,” says Hegel, in his Gesch. d. Philos., Werke, vol. xiv. p. 
368, “ist der Urheber der verstdndigen Logik ; ihre Formen betreffen nur 
das Verhaltniss von Endlichen zu einander, und in ihnen kann das Wahre 
nicht gefasst werden.” This observation occurs in connection with a dis¬ 
cussion of the Aristotelian theory of universals, which is there said to in¬ 
volve the method used “in den endlichen Wissenschaften,” namely, “ das 
Subsumiren des Besondern unter das Allgemeine .” It is just this sort of 
universality and this kind of subsumption that Hegel’s theory is intended 
to supersede. 


APPENDIX C. 


495 


the content of the individual thing, or the totality of the actual 
relations of this individual thing to others in the real world. 1 
Speaking in objective terms we can indeed already say that the 
Gedanke corresponds to an allgemeine Natur , present as das 
Wesentliche, or as die besti/mmte Wesentlichkeit of the finite in¬ 
dividuals that belong to the Gattung. For the thoughts even of 
the understanding have a lower sort of truth. Whatever is in 
the world is the embodiment of thought; and in so far as the 
Gedanken of the understanding are also the product of thought, 
they do correspond to the inner nature of things. Only, the 
universals of the understanding tell but a portion of the real 
truth about the objects present in experience. And in just so 
far these universals are untrue. The Begriff, or the truly objec¬ 
tive thought of the whole nature of things, will be “ mehr als nur 
die Angabe der wesentlichen Bestimmtheiten, d. i., der Ver- 
standesbestimmungen einer Sache.” 2 The universal of the 
understanding, applying to a nature which is only exemplified 
by each individual, and which_exists nowhere but in such indi¬ 
vidual examples (as animality exists only in individual ani¬ 
mals), tells us nothing about the interrelationship of the indi¬ 
viduals themselves, gives us therefore no Einheit des Begriffes. 

Of this universal of the understanding Hegel gives us many 
accounts. No intelligent student of his works can confound this 
sort of universality with the true Vernunft-Allgemeinheit, whose 
exposition forms Hegel’s peculiar contribution to the theory of 
universals. To sum up so far: The universal of the under- 

1 It is of this stage of thought that Hegel is speaking when, in the En- 
cyclop., Werke, vol. vi. p. 46, he says : “ Das Thier als solches ist nicht zu 
zeigen, sondem immer nur ein Bestimmtes. Das Thier existirt nicht, son- 
dern ist die allgemeine Natur der einzelnen Thiere.” Thier is, so far, no 
Begriff, no true universal at all. And Existenz , with its verb existiren, 
has a special meaning in Hegel’s logic. The Begriff when we get to it, 

* will have a higher sort of reality, namely, what Hegel calls Objektivitat, 
something much more than hare Existenz. 

2 Logik, WerJce, vol. iii. p. 274. Compare Encyclop., WerJce, vol. vi. p. 
65, where the business of the understanding in grasping the wesentlichen 
Inhalt of finite things, in classifying abstractly, and in applying predicates 
accordingly, is further illustrated. The technical phrases wesentliche Be- 
stimmtheit, bestimmte Wesentlichheit, etc., refer, then, only to universality as 
conceived by the understanding. 


496 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


standing is the first discovery of our thought when the latter 
is applied to things. Of this universal it was that Aristotle’s 
logic gave the traditional theory. Aristotle himself, to be sure, 
in his metaphysical theory, really transcended the limitations of 
his logical theory, and implied the existence of a deeper and 
truer sort of universality in the nature of things. But he did 
this haltingly. 1 His metaphysical instinct is truer than his logic. 
He uses the higher universal, but has a logical theory only of 
the lower. And as for this lower, it appears to the understand¬ 
ing as objectively existent only in each individual , as constitut¬ 
ing the essence or wesentliche Bestimmtheit thereof. Subjec¬ 
tively it is represented by the Gedanke , which is the thought of 
some abstractly defined class-essence. And such class-essences 
appear to the understanding to have no Existenz as such, apart 
from the individuals in which they are exemplified. This is 
why we are accustomed to say, from the point of view of ordi¬ 
nary thought, that general ideas do not represent concrete reali¬ 
ties, and that only the individual is real. 


ii. 

Principal Caird, in his “ Philosophy of Religion,” 2 after de¬ 
scribing the foregoing lower sort of universality, and pointing 
out its inadequacy to the expression of the truth of the real 
world, proceeds, in a confessedly Hegelian spirit, to set forth 
the nature of the Vernunft-Allgemeinheit , and its application to 
the comprehension of the relations of God and the world, as 
follows: — 

“ But thought is capable of another and deeper movement. 
It can rise to a universality which is not foreign to, but the very 
inward nature of things in themselves, not the universal of an 
abstraction from the particular and different, but the unity 
which is immanent in them and finds in them its own necessary 

1 Gesch. d. Phil., Werlce, vol. xiv. p. 283 : “ Hat Aristoteles aber auch . .. 
die allgemeine Idee nicht logisch herausgehoben, (denn sonst ware seine 
sogenannt Logik, die etwas Anderes ist, fur die Methode als der eine Begriff 
in Allem zu erkennen), so ersclieint doeh andererseits bei Aristoteles die 
Idee Gottes, selbst auch als ein Besonderes an ihrer Stelle neben den Andern, 
obzwar sie alle Wahrheit ist.” 

2 Page 229, sqq. 


APPENDIX C. 


497 


expression; not an arbitrary invention of the observing and 
classifying mind, . . . but an idea which expresses the inner 
dialectic, the movement or process towards unity, which exists 
in and constitutes the being of the objects themselves. This 
deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated 
ideal or organic universality . The idea of a living organism 
... is not a common element which can be got at by abstrac¬ 
tion and generalization, by taking the various parts and mem¬ 
bers, stripping away their differences, and forming a notion of 
that which they have in common. That in which they differ is 
rather just that out of which their unity arises and in which 
is the very life and being of the organism; that which they 
have in common they have, not as members of a living organ¬ 
ism, but as dead matter, and what you have to abstract in order 
to get it is the very life itself. Moreover, the universal, in this 
case, is not last but first. We do not reach it by first thinking 
the particulars, but conversely, we get at the true notions of the 
particulars only through the universal. What the parts or 
members of an organism are, — their form, place, structure, 
proportion, functions, relations, their whole nature and being, is 
determined by the idea of the organism which they are to com¬ 
pose. It is it which produces them, not they it. In it lies their 
reason and ground. They are its manifestations or specifica¬ 
tions. It realizes itself in them, fulfills itself in their diversity 
and harmony. ... You cannot determine the particular mem¬ 
ber or organ save by reference to that which is its limit or nega¬ 
tion. It does not exist in and by itself, but in and through 
what is other than itself, — through the other members and 
organs which are at once outside of and within it, beyond it, 
and yet part and portion of its being. . . . Here, then, we have 
a kind of universality which is altogether different from the 
barren and formal universality of generalization, and the indi¬ 
cation of a movement of thought corresponding to an inner rela¬ 
tion of things which the abstracting, generalizing understanding 
is altogether inadequate to grasp.” 

Applying the notion of universality thus reached to the rela¬ 
tions of our own thought to the reality about which we think, 
Principal Caird next proceeds, on p. 233, sqq., to “ a brief con- 


498 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


sideration of the relation of Nature to Finite Mind.” He dwells 
upon the well-known opposition between matter and mind, 
which, for the understanding, are two separate and opposed 
realities. He states the familiar problem as to how mind can 
know the natural order outside of our minds, shows that this 
problem is the same in principle with the problem about the rela¬ 
tion between finite mind and God, and suggests, as a solution of 
both problems, the thought, the “ Nature,” the finite mind, and 
God or the infinite mind, are not discordant or irreconcilable 
ideas, but ideas which belong to one organic whole or system 
of knowledge. After devoting considerable space to the illus¬ 
tration of this view, and dwelling further on the “ principle of 
Organic Unity ” (p. 238), he points out (p. 239) that the prob¬ 
lem of knowledge is to be solved on the basis of the theory of 
the organic universal itself. “It is but a spurious idealism 
which makes the world without only the illusory creation of the 
individual mind. Rather the truth is that the individual mind 
must renounce its own isolated independence, must cease to 
assert itself, must lose itself in the object, before it can attain 
to any true knowledge of Nature. ... In order, therefore, to 
attain to the universal life of reason that is in the world, it is 
an indispensable condition that I renounce my own individuality, 
my particular thought and opinion, and find the true realization 
of my own reason in that absolute reason or truth which Nature 
manifests. . . . The principle in fine that solves the difference 
between Nature and Finite Mind is, that their isolated reality 
and exclusiveness is a figment, and that the organic life of 
reason is the truth or reality of both.” 

On page 240, Principal Caird continues his discussion by ap¬ 
plying the same principle to “ the solution of the higher prob¬ 
lem of Religion, or of the relation of the Finite Mind to God.” 
“ Here, too, it will be seen that the understanding, which clings 
to the hard independent identity of either side . . . renders any 
true solution impossible. ... A true solution can be reached 
only by apprehending the Divine and the Human, the Infinite 
and the Finite, as the moments or members of an organic whole, 
in which both exist, at once in their distinction and their unity.” 
Principal Caird then gives as a further illustration of the true 


APPENDIX C. 


499 

theory of universals, and as an aid in comprehending the organic 
unity first mentioned, “ the relation of the individual to other 
individuals ” in the “ case of our social relations.” “ The ordi¬ 
nary conception of self-identity isolates the individual from his 
fellow-men.” But this, says our author, is wrong. “ The ab¬ 
stract individual is not truly man, hut only a fragment of human¬ 
ity, a being as devoid of the moral and spiritual elements which 
are of the essence of the man’s life, as the amputated limb of 
participation in the vital existence of the organism. The social 
relations are a necessary part of the being of the individual. . . . 
It is not by supposing in the first place a number of individual 
human beings, each complete in himself, and then combining 
these individuals, that we reach the idea of the Family; rather 
must we first think the Family in order to know the individual. 

. . . Here, as elsewhere, the universal is the prius of the par¬ 
ticular. Yet the universal must not be conceived as having any 
reality apart from the particulars, any more than the body apart 
from its members. The true idea is reached only by holding 
both together in that hightr unity which at once comprehends 
and transcends them, that organic unity, whether of the Family 
or the State, which is the living integration of the individual 
members which compose it.” “ In the same fashion,” con¬ 
tinues Principal Caird, “ the true Infinite is not the negation of 
the Finite, but that which is the organic unity of the Infinite 
and Finite.” 

hi. 

The foregoing quotations from Principal Caird will serve, 
both to give an excellent summary of certain aspects of the 
Hegelian theory of universals, and to show that the theory itself 
is no novelty to English readers.* It has become a common¬ 
place of discussion for one whole school of neo-Hegelians. 

To pass, however, to Hegel’s own • account of the matter. 
“ Thought,” says Hegel, “is in the first place thought after the 
fashion of the understanding; hut thought does not remain on 
this stage, and the Begriff is not a mere Verstandesbestim- 

1 Cf. also Professor Edward Caird’s Social Philosophy of Auguste Comte, 
p. 199 : “ The universal of science and philosophy is . . . not merely a 
generic name, under which things are brought together, but a principle 
which unites them and determines their relation to each other. ’ ’ 


500 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


mung.” 1 The higher movement of the Vernunft depends on 
the well-known Dialektik of thought, which takes the abstract 
facts and qualities that the understanding has sundered, the 
Bestimmungen , or SeitSn , or Individuen of the finite world, 
and discovers “ die Einheit der Bestimfnungen in ihrer Entgegen- 
setzung.” 2 This Dialektik has a “ positive result,” namely, 
the discovery of das Vernunftige , which is not merely ein Ab- 
strakteSy but “ zugleich ein Konkretes, 3 weil es nicht einfache, 
formelle Einheit, sondern Einheit unterschiedener Bestimmun¬ 
gen ist. Mit blossen Abstraktionen oder formellen Gedanken 
hat es darum tiberhaupt die Philosophic ganz und gar nicht zu 
thun, sondern allein mit konkreten Gedanken.” 

The Allgemeinheit des Verstandes is, therefore, transformed 
into the Begrijf whenever two related processes have been 
carried out: (1) When the formal abstractions or wesentliche 
Bestimmungen , which the understanding separates from one an¬ 
other, and opposes to one another, — such abstractions as right 
and lefty inner and outer, substance and accident , — have been 
united once more by organic ties, and shown to be interrelated 
and inseparable 4 ; and (2) When, by the same means, the things 
of the finite world have been shown to be members of one 
organic total. The intimate relationship of these two processes 
for Hegel is one of the prominent characteristics of his whole 
method. Das Wahre ist konkret means for him equally, “ The 
truth is an organic union of interrelated aspects, characters, 
qualities,” and “ The truth is the Universal in which the par¬ 
ticulars and individuals are organically joined.” 6 For example, 

1 Encycl., Werke, vol. vi. p. 147. The following pages contain a repeti¬ 

tion of the account given above of the nature and limitations of the Ver- 
standes-Allgemeinheit. * 

2 Loc. cit., p. 157. 

8 On the Hegelian use of konkret , see the excellent definition of Falcken- 
berg’s Gesch. d. neueren Philosophie, p. 478: “ The concrete Begrijf of 
Hegel is an Universal that has the Particular in itself, and that produces 
its own particulars ( sich besondert ).” 

4 Logik, Werke, vol. iv. pp. 63, 64. 

6 “Das einzelne Seyn ist irgend eine Seite der Idee,” Hegel has said in 
the passage quoted above. In various passages he identifies Seite with 
Bestimmung; so, for instance, in the Religionsphilosophie , Werke , vol. xii. 
p. 422, where he speaks of the Zusammenhang zweier Seiten oder Bestim¬ 
mungen. From these and many other passages it easily becomes evident 


APPENDIX C. 


501 


in the case of any man such as Caius or Titus, Hegel says : 1 
“ Was der einzelne Mensch im Besonderen ist, das ist er nur in 
sofern, als er vor alien Dingen Mensch als solcher ist und im 
Allgemeinen ist, und diess Allgemeine ist nicht nur etwas ausser 
und neben andern abstrakten Qualit&ten . . . sondern viel- 
melir das alles Besondere Durchdringende und in sich Beschlies- 
sende.” Moreover, as he tells us, das Allgemeine is here, in 
case of humanity, and in its deepest truth, something more than 
all men. 2 It does more than include in an indifferent way the 
individuals. It is for them all not “ bloss etwas denselben 
Gemeinschaftliches,” it is their Grand , their Boden, their Sub- 
stanz. Now here is humanity regarded as something universal 
and kon/cret. As such it is at once all men , and it is more. It 
is something pervading and determining all the characteristics 
of each man, and binding together all his besondere Qualitdten. 
It is thus konkret in two senses, namely, in so far as in it all 
men are together, and in so far as through it all Qualitdten of 
each man are united. Yet not even in this passage is Hegel 
expounding the completely organic universal, but only a form on 
the way towards the realization of it. It will be noticed, how¬ 
ever, that here he distinctly declares that the individual is im 
Allgemeinen , “in the Universal” which is, therefore , the inclu¬ 
sive Substanz of the individuals. 

The notion of the Vernunft-Allgemeinheit thus introduced re¬ 
ceives a lengthy development in the “ Logik.” The way for this 
Allgemeinheit des Begrijfes is prepared, in the larger “ Logik,” 
by elaborate discussions under the head of Wesen (that is, in Part 
Second of the work). In the second division of Wesen, in dis- 

that for Hegel both abstract characters and abstract individuals are to be 
treated alike, in so far as they have their truth only in the organic whole 
of which they are elements. Compare once more Falckenberg’s definition 
of Hegel’s use of “ concrete,” as given above. That the Individual is con¬ 
tained in the Universal is also expressly asserted by Hegel (WerJce, vol. vi. 
p. 323; compare p. 316). 

1 Encyclop., WerJce, vol. vi. p. 340. 

2 Id., p. 339. In case of the form of logical judgment which Hegel is 
discussing in the passage now cited, he is laying special stress upon the fact 
that here already, although the true Vernunft-Allgemeinheit has not been 
fully reached, the individual stands in relation to others, and is not con¬ 
ceived by himself, or apart from his relations. 


502 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


cussing the Erscheinung, Hegel shows, in a fashion which he 
was elsewhere fond of dwelling upon, and illustrating, that the 
qualities or Eigenschaften of every finite thing are its Weisen 
des Verhaltens zu Andern ; 1 so that all the things of the finite 
world are what they are by virtue of their relations to one an¬ 
other. They are in Wechselwirkung , 2 and it is their nature to 
be so. Hence the world of these finite things is a world of a 
Gesetz , or all-embracing law, of which the things and qualities 
are the appearance , while this Gesetz or Reich der Gesetze is a 
self-determined Totalitat. As the law at the basis of the finite 
world is, however, fully expressed, but only expressed in the 
phenomena themselves, the result here is an Einheit des Innern 
und des Aeussern wherein, as Hegel tells us, the Begrijf is 
already present in a latent form ; for our world of finite things 
is thus a totality of interrelated individuals that embody a 
law and make it manifest. It is, however, just this Totalitat 
that im Begriffe als solcliem appears as das Allgemeine . 8 In 
the world of Wesen this unity of inner and outer is so far called 
die Wirklichkeit. K The true nature of Wirklichkeit appears 
in the exposition of the category of Substanz at the end of 
Wesen, where finally die absolute Substanz, or general nature 
of things, appears as a “ Totality ” that is as a “ simple Whole,” 
which determines itself “ and contains its self-determinations in 
itself.” This Totality is das Allgemeine, which, together with 
its correlated categories, das Einzelne and das Besondere, makes 
up the Begrijf, to which Hegel herewith passes. 

The intricate exposition of the Begrijf, in the third part of 
the “ Logik,” is rendered somewhat clearer by the lecture notes 
which were added by Hegel’s editors to the corresponding para¬ 
graphs of the “ Encyklopadie.” From these one or two quota¬ 
tions have been made in the text. It is perhaps enough to point 
out here that one best and most easily sees what the Begrijf is 
meant to be if one passes forthwith to the place where its nature 
is “ writ large ” in the world of Objektivitat, 6 into which it 

1 Logik, Werke, vol. iv. p. 125. 

2 Id ., p. 128. 

8 Logik, Werke, vol. iv. p. 174. 

4 Id., p. 178. Die Wirklichkeit appears first as das Absolute, which corre* 
sponds ( loc . cit. pp. 187-190) to Spinoza’s Substance. 

5 Logik, Werke , vol. v., pp. 167-228 ; Encyclop., Werke, vol. vi. pp. 365-384 


APPENDIX C. 


503 


“ passes over,” and in which it expresses itself. Here one has 
a repetition on a higher stage of what took place in Wesen. 
Once more one deals with a world of objects, only now they are 
known to embody the Begriff\ whose true universality they show 
in three ascending phases, mechanism , chemism , and teleology . 
The world of mechanism, or, as one might say, the world as 
“ Machine,” is the world whose parts have indeed interrelation¬ 
ships, but only those of abstract law. In the world of “ affini¬ 
ties ” or of “ Chemism,” the individuals exist only as interrelated, 
and only by virtue of their affinities and the results of these. 
In the still truer and more inclusive world of “ Teleology,” or, 
as one might say, in the world as “ Organism,” the interrelated¬ 
ness of the individual objects and their cooperation as instru¬ 
ments of one immanent purpose, which is their true universal, 
prepares the way for that complete union of Begriff and Objekt 
which is given us in the Idee. The Idee, in fact, is the world 
as “ Person ” so far as the categories of the “ Logik ” enable the 
notion of personality to be introduced. The full notion of person¬ 
ality is developed, later in the system, in the philosophy of spirit. 

These Hegelian formulations of the theory of universals have 
no doubt many antiquated features. Their presence and impor¬ 
tance in the system is indubitable. As pointed out in my text, 
the most interesting expressions of the whole doctrine occur in 
Hegel’s ethical and theological works. A full collection of pas¬ 
sages is impossible in the present space. A few more may yet 
be given. It is an explicit and deliberate application of the 
theory of the organic universal when Hegel says, in his “ Rechts- 
philosophie,” that the individual man is no person u ohne Rela¬ 
tion zu anderen Personen.” 1 This notion, closely related to that 
of the Allgemeinheit des Bewusstseins mentioned in the text, 
appears very prominently in the whole structure of the “ Rechts- 
philosophie.” It is another application of this same theory when 
Hegel says, in the “ Religionsphilosophie,” in describing the life 
of the church, that the subjective religious consciousness has to 
be realized by eine Vielheit von Subjekten und Individuen , but 
that, since this consciousness is to be universal in the deeper 

1 Werlce, vol. viii., p. 417. Cf. p. 110: “ Es 1st durch die Vernunft 
ebenso nothwendig dass die Menschen in Vertrags-Verhaltnisse eingehen 
als dass sie Eigenthum besitzen.” 


504 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


sense, “ so ist die Viellieit der Individuen durchaus zu setzen als 
nur ein Schein, und eben dieses, dass sie sich selbst als diesen 
Schein setzt, ist die Einheit des Glaubens. . . . Das ist die 
Liebe der Gemeinde, die aus vielen Subjekten zu bestehen 
scheint, welche Viellieit aber nur ein Schein ist.” 1 “ Many mem¬ 
bers,” then, but only one body, one Lord, one faith. Further 
on Hegel discusses in the same spirit the relation of the individ¬ 
uals to their universal as illustrated by the relation of the faith¬ 
ful to the person of Christ. The application of the same theory 
of universals to the general problem of the relation of God to 
the world appears at the close of the “ Encyklopadie.” The “ Na- 
turphilosophie ” is also full of applications : so, for instance, the 
explanation of the relations of the sexes, and of the struggle of 
the various species of animals for existence, as in both cases due 
to the fact that the universal can nowhere completely realize itself 
in any one individual, or in any group of individuals . 2 Since, ac¬ 
cording to Hegel, the Idee cannot come to full expression in outer 
nature, the Universal is in all these cases displayed to us only 
imperfectly, as an endless series of efforts towards the completely 
organic, which is perfectly realized only in the world as spirit. 

To return, finally, for one moment, to the logical theory it¬ 
self : It is the immanently organic nature of the true universal 
that in the doctrine of the subjektiven Begrijf forces the Begriff 
to develop its various Seiten in the Urtheil , since only by vir¬ 
tue of the relation of apparently divided, but really and organi¬ 
cally inseparable, aspects or individuals can any universality 
be realized. Of TJrtheile the highest sort, before the class in 
the TJrtheile des Begrijfes proper is reached, is the disjunc¬ 
tive judgments , just because they represent the Unterschiede 
or Besonderungen of their subjects as in every case an inter¬ 
related group of species or of individuals . 3 For “ das Allge- 
meine ist das Einfache welches ebensosehr das Reichste in sich 

1 Werlce , vol. xii., pp. 313, 314. The important thing here is that Hegel 
expressly regards this as an application of his logical theory. Compare 
p. 309. 

2 WerTce , vol. vii., 1, pp. 640, 641, 643, 645, 648, 649. In particular, p. 
648, ‘‘Die Gattung existirt in einer Reihe von einzelnen Lebendigen,” —« 
not in any single individual. 

3 Werke, vol. v., pp. 102-107. 


APPENDIX C. 


505 


selbst ist ,” 1 and this wealth of the universal gets unfolded in 
the disjunctive judgment. The universal is die Negativitat 
ilberhaupt ; 2 and this self-differentiation gets an expression in 
the disjunctive judgment. It is the Begrijf itself that sich dis- 
jungirt in the true disjunctive judgment . 8 But the genuine 
Urtheil des Begrijfes is something still higher, since not only 
the fact, but the inner necessity and self-determination of this 
differentiation must be made evident, a thing which can only be 
done by forms of judgment that carry us on to the Schluss . 4 
The Schluss passes through a number of successive forms whose 
highest is the disjunctive conclusion , 8 wherein once more the 
reason for the result reached by the conclusion lies in the rela¬ 
tion of one included member or Moment of some universal to the 
universal itself, and to the other members or Momente of the 
same organic and self-differentiated whole. With the disjunc¬ 
tive conclusion the transition is made to the world of Objektivi- 
tdt , where, as before shown, the universal is realized in expli¬ 
citly organic form as the totality of the related individuals or 
Momente, whose perfection and truth is the Idee. 

One word still in conclusion as to the relation of the lower or 
Aristotelian form of the “universal of the understanding/’ to 
Hegel’s own “ universal of the reason.” Hegel himself says: 6 
“ The logic of the mere understanding is contained in the logic 
of reason, and can be made at once therefrom. Nothing is 
needed for this purpose but the omission from the latter of the 
dialectical and so distinctively rational element.” It is well to 
observe that, as Hegel himself has confessed, in one of his let¬ 
ters to Niethammer , 7 it was according to this method that he 
felt himself obliged to proceed in the exposition of his logic, 

1 Id., p 36. 

2 Id., p. 39. Readers of the discussion of Negativitat in the text will 
see the significance of this consideration. 

3 Id., p. 105. 4 Id., p- H5, sqq. 

5 Id., p. 162, sqq. 

6 Encyclop., Werhe, vol. vi. p. 158: “ In der spekulativen Logik ist die 
blosse Verstandes-Logik enthalten, und kann aus jener sogleich gemacht 
werden ; es bedarf dazu Nichts als daraus das Dialektische und Verniinf- 
tige wegzulassen.” 

i See the recently issued vol. xix. of the Werhe. edited by Karl Hegel 
(Leipzig, 1887), part i. p. 340. 


506 


THE SPIRIT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY. 


which he undertook for the boys in the Ntirnberg gymnasium. 
Only die verstdndige Logik, he tells Niethammer, is suited to 
gymnasial instruction. Youth at this time needs purely posi - 
tiven Inhalt and is not ripe for das Spekulative. The dialecti¬ 
cal can be only here and there suggested, and never correctly 
presented in such elementary work. Hence it happens that in 
the so-called Propaedeutik , which Rosenkranz edited from He¬ 
gel’s posthumous MSS and published in 1840 as the eighteenth 
volume of the “ Werke,” and which contains the gist of Hegel’s 
instruction to the boys at Ntirnberg, one finds but few hints of 
the Hegelian theory of Universals. If this little volume, in 
fact, were our only record of Hegel, all his peculiar theories, 
whether as to Idealism in general or as to the nature of Self- 
consciousness, or as to Universals, would remain almost wholly 
unknown to us ; and such theories must not be sought there, 
but in Hegel’s own deliberate expressions of them, and above all 
in the works which he himself published during Jiis life. 


INDEX 


Absolute, the, with Kant, 139, 142- 
145 ; with Fichte, 159, 160, 192 ; 
with Schelling, 184, 193; with 
Hegel, 213-216, 221; with Scho¬ 
penhauer, 239, 240, 253, 263, 264. 
See Self, absolute. 

Adickes, Erich, Kant’s “ Kritik der 
Reinen Vernunft ” edited by, 483, 
491. 

Agassiz, erabryological studies of, 
286. 

Aggregation, process of, 324, 325. 

Agnosticism, its relation to idealism, 
344-349, 448. 

Amos, the prophet, a false religious 
optimism condemned by, 447,448, 
458, 459. 

Analogies of experience, 488. 

Analysis, self-, as characteristic of 
the eighteenth-century philosophy, 
33, 80-82, 93, 101. 

Analytic and synthetic aspects of 
idealism, 350, 351, 364. 

Anthropomorphism, doctrine of, 345, 
427. 

Antinomies, cosmological, Kant, 123; 
their source, 420; in the spiritual 
world, 437-440. 

Apperception, transcendental unity 
of, 484-491. 

Appreciation, distinction between, 
and description, in ordinary real¬ 
ism, 387-389; its formless and un¬ 
categorized character, 390, 391; 
illustrated from Shelley, 393 ; from 
Schiller, 393; that outer truth is 
not given by appreciation ia the 
presupposition of natural science, 
390, 395; a possible real world 
of, 393-397; exemplified by the or¬ 
ganic unity of the spiritual world, 
405-410; its categories those of 


self-consciousness, 411; a world of 
ideals, 412; presupposed by the 
world of description, 410, 413-415. 
See Aspect, double ; Description. 

A priori principles, of empirical sci¬ 
ence, 398. 

Aristotle, the writings of, and Plato, 
interpret Hellenic life, 9; the 
founder of the logic of the under¬ 
standing, 494, 496, 505. 

Art, Schopenhauer’s theory of, 255- 
257. 

Ashley, Lord Anthony, later Earl of 
Shaftesbury, a friend of Locke, 78. 

Aspect, double, doctrine of, 415-419; 
applied to the facts of the inor¬ 
ganic world, 419-422; to the prob¬ 
lem of evolution, 422-428; to the 
problem of freedom, 428-434. 

Astronomy, the progress of, 312. 

Atoms, the nature of, 393, 399. 

Axioms, of Spinoza, questioned in 
the eighteenth century, 69-70; 
of natural science, relate to the 
world of description, 397-404. 

Bacon, 475. 

Baer, von, embryological researches 
of, 286. 

Beethoven, 172. 

Begriff, the Hegelian, 221, 222, 500- 
506. 

Being, Berkeley’s theory of, 87-90; 
the nature of, Kant, 124, 125, 
485-488; Hegel’s theory of, 218- 
227, 492-506. 

Belief, true and false, 374-378. 

Berkeley, Bishop, idealism of, a de¬ 
velopment of eighteenth-century 
humanism, 33, 71 ; type of char¬ 
acter, 86, 87; his theory of vision, 
88-89, 475; the being of sensible 




508 


INDEX. 


things, to he perceived, 87, 90; his 
doctrine an extension of Locke’s, 
90; the sources of ideas, 91; an 
omnipresent eternal mind, 91; at¬ 
tractive form of his idealism, 91, 
92 ; relation of his doctrine to the 
rediscovery of the inner life, 93, 
351; his “ Principles of Human 
Knowledge,” 93, 475. 

Berlin, as a centre of German liter¬ 
ary interest, 170. 

Bible, the, modern critical study of, 
45. 

Boeckh, 282. 

Boehme, 475. 

Bourne, H. R. F., “ Life of Locke,” 
by, 475. 

Brown, John, Kant the, of nine¬ 
teenth century speculative war¬ 
fare, 138. 

Browning, delight of, in the para¬ 
doxes of passion, 261; “ perfec¬ 
tion in imperfection,” 454. 

Bruno, 475. 

Byron, 478. 

Caird, Edward, “ Philosophy of Im¬ 
manuel Kant ” by, cited, 108, 476; 
“Life of Hegel” by, cited, 195, 
479; “Social Philosophy of Au¬ 
gustus Comte ” by, cited, 499. 

Caird, John, “Spinoza” by, 475; 
“Philosophy of Religion” by, 
quoted, 496-499. 

Campanella, 475. 

Caprice, an element of, in the com¬ 
mon selfhood of idealism, 236; 
doctrine of, by Schopenhauer, 237- 
240, 263-264; the, of the highest 
reason, 429. 

Caroline Schlegel, 181; wife of Schel- 
ling, 182 ; her remarkable letters, 
185; motto in verse by, for Fichte, 
183; Fichte’s genius and Schel- 
ling’s contrasted by, 183, 184. 

Carus, Paul, “ Fundamental Princi¬ 
ples ’ ’ by, cited, 398. 

Categories, Kant’s, forms of thought, 
127-131; the, of Hegel, 218-222; 
the, of the world of description, 
397-404; of the world of appre¬ 
ciation, 411-415. See Deduction 
of the categories. 

Causation, origin of the conception, 
Hume, 94-97; doctrine of Scho¬ 
penhauer, 250, 251; physical, in¬ 
sufficient to explain the history of 


the world, 290, 425, 426; axiom 
of, belongs to the world of descrip¬ 
tion, 344-348, 400-404; no appli¬ 
cation to world of appreciation, 
348,413-415; reality is the world- 
self, 348-350, 415-422. 

Certainty, Descartes’ quest for, 75- 
78. 

Chance, brute, the deepest problem 
of evil, 465-469; our, the ration¬ 
ality of the Infinite, 469—472. 

Change. See Evolution, Nature and 
Evolution. 

Christopher, St., his service of God, 

53. 

Christianity, essence of, embodied in 
speculative theory, 143-145. 

Civilization, progress of, 7-12, 281- 
287. 

Clearness, essential in thought, 

Locke, 83. 

Clifford, W. K., “ The First and Last 
Catastrophe,” a lecture by, cited, 
318; his theory of a definable end¬ 
less process for the physical uni¬ 
verse, 318-324; difficulties of his 
hypothesis, 324-336. 

“ Cogito , ergo sum” famous princi¬ 
ple of Descartes, 76. 

Coleridge, 478. 

Conscience, doctrine of, Kant, 112- 
118. 

Consciousness, discussion of human, 
by Locke, 82-86; relation of, to 
outer reality, Berkeley, 93; space 
and time, conditions of, Kant, 
123-125; “all consciousness is 
an appeal to other consciousness,” 
Hegel, 208-210; paradox of, 210- 
215; analysis of, the problem of 
modern idealism, 232, 233; a re¬ 
sult of evolution, mind-stuff 
theory, 311; twofold character 
of, 406, 407, 411, 419-434; rela¬ 
tion of empirical and transcenden¬ 
tal, 483-488. See Self-conscious¬ 
ness. 

Consciousness, religious, twofold in¬ 
terests of, 46-48; contemplative 
form of, Spinoza and the “ Imita¬ 
tion,” 49-57,69 ; the perfection of 
the divine substance, Spinoza, 58- 
66; active form of, Kant, 111-118; 
Fichte’s theism, 160-162; Hegel’s 
paradox, 203-218; transcends 
time, in world of appreciation, 
425-428, 457-461. 



INDEX. 


509 


Constructive imagination, office of, 
Kant, 130, 139. 

Contraction, as a source of heat, 315. 

Copernicus, Kant the, of philosophy, 
311. 

Cosmology, problems of a philosophi¬ 
cal, 381. 

Courage, spiritual, 117. 

“Critique of the Pure Reason,” 
Kant’s publication of, 34, 68, 107, 
476,483; its essential thought, 34; 
phases in study of, 102-105; its 
early influence, 108, 148; its de¬ 
structive and constructive effects, 
111. See Kant. 

Crusaders, spirit of, 229. 

Curiosity, different forms of, 6-12. 

Cynicism, wonderful temperament 
of, in Spinoza, 56; occasional, of 
Fichte, 149. 

Darwin, his power of detailed inves¬ 
tigation, 78; the doctrine of evo¬ 
lution, and his “ Origin of Spe¬ 
cies,” 284-287. 

Declaration of Independence, 275. 

Deduction of the categories, Kant’s, 
126-131; the Kantian doctrine, a 
development, Falckenberg, 483- 
486; Yaihinger, 486-488; Erdmann, 
489; neutral formulation of Kant’s 
results, 490, 491. See Categories. 

Descartes, a representative thinker 
of the seventeenth century, 29, 
475; his philosophic doubt, 29,75 ; 
“ Cogito, ergo sum” his princi¬ 
ple of absolute certainty, 76; his 
system of innate truths, 75-77; 
problem of their multiplicity, 77, 
78. 

Description, the world of, the outer 
or natural order, 383, 395; its per¬ 
manent and universal elements, 
384-388; the test of its objectiv¬ 
ity, similarity of human experi¬ 
ence, 387, 388; the test of similar 
experience, the sameness of de¬ 
scription, 388; describable expe¬ 
rience, reproducible and under 
forms or categories, 390-395; de¬ 
duction of the categories of, 397- 
404; not the whole of the real 
world, 405-408; contrast of, and 
the world of appreciation, 395, 
396, 409-415, 424-428 ; real in so 
far as it is an aspect of the world 
of the Logos, 416-423, 432-434. 

\ 


Design, old argument of, 92; physi¬ 
cal world symbolic of the, of the 
Logos, 421-424. 

Diderot, 81. 

Dilemma, the, either idealism or the 
unknowable, 364-368. 

Dinge an sich, Kant’s, unknowable, 
131, 476, 484, 485. 

Distance, infinite, difficulties of, in 
Clifford’s statement of an endlessly 
consolidating world, 332-334. 

Dogmatism, Kant’s relation to, 115- 
119. 

Doubt, philosophical, fruitful peri¬ 
ods of, 71-74; Cartesian, 29, 75; 
ablest expression of, by Hume, 
93-98; lesson of, 98-100; Kantian, 
115-119, 126-132, 477; involves 
the larger self, 378-379; the, of 
genuine pessimism, 463-469; an¬ 
swered, 469-471. 

Duty, emphasized by Kant, 112- 
114. 

Eclecticism, 16. 

Ego , the, Fichte, 156-160. 

Emerson’s “ Brahma, ” 99. 

Emotions, human, explanation of, in 
the seventeenth century, 28; the 
romantic spirit, 174. 

Energy, redistributions of matter 
and, 313-315,337; law of degrada¬ 
tion of, and evolution, 316-318, 
337; Clifford’s theory of a defin¬ 
able endless process, 318-336; the 
world of the “ running down,” not 
the final truth, 337-340, 421. 

“Epicurean Confession of Faith of 
Hans Bristleback,” Schelling’s, 
186; its clear statement of the 
Naturphilosophie, 186; the poem, 
187-189. 

Erdmann, Benno, his “Reflexionen 
Kant’s zur Kritischen Philoso- 
phie,” cited, 107, 119, 122, 123, 
125, 126, 486, 489. 

“Essay on the Human Understand¬ 
ing,” Locke’s, publication of, 78, 
475; history of, in its preface, 
79, 80; its historical influence, 80, 
81; its doctrine, 81 - 86. See 

Locke. 

Error, involves the larger self, 376- 
378. 

Ethics, English, of eighteenth cen¬ 
tury, a development of the new 
humanism, 33; the “Ethics” of 




510 


INDEX. 


Spinoza, cited, 58, 60, 61, 62, 64, 
475; quoted, 66, 67. 

Euclid, Hegelian categories not com¬ 
prehensible by definitions of, 218. 

European thought, transformed, 80, 
84. 

Events, predetermined, Spinoza, 63; 
character of, in the world of de¬ 
scription, 387-404 ; in the world of 
appreciation, 405-415. 

Evil, attitude towards, of Spinoza, 
54; of Kant, 115-117; problem of, 
437-441 ; an illusion, Lanier, 442- 
447 ; and mystical resignation, 450, 
451; and pessimism, 452 ; the syn¬ 
thesis, “perfection in imperfec¬ 
tion,” 454-461, 469-471. 

Evolution, rise of the doctrine of, 
Lecture IX; transition from ro¬ 
mantic idealism to modern realism 
in Schopenhauer, 264-266; the 
return not an abandonment of 
idealism, 266-270; science thereby 
enriched, 270-272; evolution a 
postulate of idealistic interpreta¬ 
tion, 273-276; modern historical 
spirit an outgrowth of romanti¬ 
cism, 276-285 ; Darwin’s “ Origin 
of Species,” 285, 286; his natural 
selection and the transformation of 
species, 287; conflict of physical 
necessity and historical ideals, 288; 
problem of the philosophy of evo¬ 
lution, 288-291; synthesis, 291- 
294; Spencer’s “ Formula of Evo¬ 
lution,” 294-298; his Unknowable, 
298; result of his system, 299, 300; 
monistic doctrines, 300, 304; mind- 
stuff theory, 301-303; the deeper 
self, 304-307. See Nature and 
Evolution. 

Experience, the basis of all know¬ 
ledge, Locke, 83, 84; the world 
of, a world of ideas, Berkeley, 87- 
91; furnishes all the materials of 
thought, Hume, 94; must conform 
to the forms of thought, Kant, 
127, 844; due to caprice of world 
will, Schopenhauer, 239; agnostic 
view of, 344-347; in every, the 
absolute self, 348-350; nature 
of, in the world of description, 
387-395, 398-404; the reality of 
the world of appreciation, 395-397, 
404-415. 

Explanation and cause, the same, 
Spinoza, 59. 


Faith, not a dogma but an active 
postulate, Kant, 115-117. 

Falckenberg, his view of the Kant¬ 
ian deduction, 483-486. 

“Faust,” Goethe’s, a product of the 
revolutionary period, 99; quoted, 
100, 439. 

Feeling, a guide to reason, romanti¬ 
cists, 175. 

Fichte, the significance of Kantian 
doctrine, 135-139; its transforma¬ 
tion the common task of Fichte, 
Schelling, and Hegel, 139-145 ; his 
career and temperament, 146-151; 
ransomed from Spinozism by Kant, 
151, 152 ; rejects Kant’s things in 
themselves, 152; principles of his 
“Subjective Idealism,” 152, 153; 
its essence, “ ethical idealism,” 
154-156; the true self, an infinite 
moral will, 156-160; theism of his 
“ Vocation of Man,” 160,161; out¬ 
come of his doctrine, 162, 163. 
Summary of lecture, 477, 478. 

Finite, the, depreciation of, by the 
“ Imitation,” 52 ; reality of the in¬ 
finite in multiplicity of, 140-142. 

Fitzgerald, stanzas from “Omar 
Khayydm ” of, 438. 

“Fool’s Prayer, The,” by Edward 
Rowland Sill, 465, 466. 

“ Fourfold Root of the Principle 
of Sufficient Reason,” Schopen¬ 
hauer’s, 250. 

Frauenstadt, “ Arthur Schopen¬ 
hauer” by, 480. 

Freedom of the will, denied, Spi¬ 
noza, 58-60; as affirmed, by Kant, 
131; by Fichte, 148. See Physical 
law and Freedom. 

French Revolution, demonstrates the 
importance of passion, 34. 

Galileo, his relation to modern phys¬ 
ical science, 28, 38; his verification 
of hypothesis by experiment, 38, 
39; influence of his method upon 
philosophy, 39, 40. 

Genius, with the romanticists, 171; 
often a pathological background 
to, 243. 

Germany, intellectual situation in, 
before the Battle of Waterloo, 
276-281; after the triumph over 
Napoleon, 146, 281-284. 

Geology, modern, its indebtedness t« 
the British mind, 285. 




INDEX. 


511 


Geometry, the model science, in 
seventeenth century, 40,41; mathe¬ 
matical method of Spinoza, 58-65; 
innate, Descartes, 77 ; nature must 
obey, Kant, 122, 126; laws of, 
probably not ultimate truths, Clif¬ 
ford, 336. 

God, doctrine of Spinoza, 60, 61; 
argument for the existence of, 
Descartes, 76; presence of, Berke¬ 
ley, 92; insufficiency of human 
reason, Hume, 94; Kant’s postu¬ 
late of existence of, 131; the moral 
order, Fichte, 160; Hegel’s abso¬ 
lute, 214-216; with Schopenhauer, 
255. See Logos. 

Goethe, his admiration for the works 
of Spinoza, 41, 42; and Fichte, 
151; and Schiller, at Weimar, 170, 
171. See “Faust.” 

Gravitative system, an imagined, 322; 
its effects, 323, 328, 329. 

Greek life, essence of, in writings of 
Plato and Aristotle, 9. 

Green and Grose, Hume’s philosophi¬ 
cal works edited by, 476. 

Grimms, the, 232. 

Gwinner, “ Schopenhauer’s Leben ” 
by, 476. 

Habit, basis of the idea of cause, 
Hume, 95-98. 

Hamlet, 276, 354, 356. 

Harris, W. J., “ Hegel’s Logic ” by, 
479. 

Hartmann, von, acknowledgment to, 
440. 

Haym, “ Hegel und seine Zeit ” by, 
479. 

Hegel, transition from Schelling to, 
191-194; his career and tempera¬ 
ment, 194-202,478, 479; his “ Pha- 
nomenologie des Geistes,” 202, 
215 ; the paradox of self-conscious¬ 
ness, 202-204; illustrated by mem¬ 
ory, 205, 206 ; an analogy in social 
life, 207, 208; “ All consciousness 
an appeal to other consciousness,” 
208; the process of self-differen¬ 
tiation, 209, 210; analogy in the 
spiritual life, 210-212; the law of 
the universal Negativitat , 213,214; 
the absolute, 215, 216; theoretical 
significance of his doctrine, 216- 
218; the “Logik,” 218, 219; its 
dialectical method applied to 
quantity, 219-221; his doctrine of 


Begriffe , 221-224, 492-506; the 
divine Idee , 224-227; his his¬ 
torical relation to Schopenhauer, 
240, 259,260,455,456. Summary 
of lecture and works, 479. See 
Universals. 

Heine, sketch of Kant’s daily life 
by, 108, 109; his “ Buch der 
Leider,” 155; his position in Ger¬ 
man literature, 169; “ History of 
German Thought and Literature ” 
by, 478. 

“ Heinrich Ofterdingen,” Schlegel’s, 
178. 

Heraclitus, 156. 

Herder, 106, 108. 

Heredity, view of Descartes, 77; 
view of Locke, 79. 

Historical spirit, modern, the out¬ 
come of the romantic movement, 
273-281; assumes definite form 
after the battle of Waterloo, 281- 
285. 

Hobbes, his merit as a thinker, 30,58. 

Hoffmann, 180. 

“ Holy Grail,” 97, 156, 465. 

Huggins, Dr., address of, upon 
Astronomy, 312-314. 

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, the Bha- 
gavat-gita expounded by, 278. 

Humanity, task of idealism to spir¬ 
itualize, 271; the deeper self an 
epitome of its history, 283. 

Hume, his philosophical rank, 93 ; his 
extension of Locke’s empiricism, 
94, 95, 101; the idea of causation 
founded on habit by, 96, 97 ; sig¬ 
nificance of his doctrine, 97-100, 
101, 136 ; awakens Kant from his 
‘ ‘ dogmatic slumber, ’ ’ 105, 125- 
127; his works, 476. 

Ibsen, the drama “ Emperor and 
Galilean ” by, quoted, 36-38. 

Ideal, Kant’s, 132, 133. 

Idealism, analytic, of Berkeley, 33, 
71, 87-92, 351; transcendental, 
of Kant, 122-124, 477, 484-491; 
transformation of Kant’s doctrine, 
the aim of post-Kantian, 139-145, 
162, 233; subjective, of Fichte, 
152-154; objective, of Schelling, 
183-186, 192, 478; absolute, of 
Hegel, 203-225, 492-506; ideal¬ 
ism on a Kantian basis, Schopen¬ 
hauer, 237-240, 265 ; task of con¬ 
structive, 235, 236, 268-282, 339, 




512 


INDEX. 


344-350; nature of analytic, 350- 
363; of synthetic, 364-386; the 
Logos, 415-434, 436-440, 454-461, 
469-471. Summary of positive 
lectures, 480 - 482. See Logos, 
Reality, and Idealism. 

Ideals, the world of appreciation a 
world of, 412 ; the mechanism of 
nature symbolizes a world of, 426. 

Ideas, innate, problem of, 74, 75 ; 
affirmed by Descartes, 76-78, 
denied by Locke, 79; their origin, 
in sensation and reflection, Locke, 
83, 84; the sense-world a world 
of, Berkeley, 87-92, 350; theory 
of Hume, 94-97. See Idealism. 

Idee , the absolute, of Hegel, 221- 
224, 492-506. 

Illusion, all phenomenal plurality an, 
Schopenhauer, 266; behind the, 
a deeper self, 307. 

Imagination, the constructive, its 
nature, Kant, 130. 

“ Imitation of Christ,” its state¬ 
ment against philosophy, 5 ; its 
contemplative religious mood, 51- 
54; parallel between the religious 
consciousness of its author and of 
Spinoza, 54, 69. 

Induction, the method of, Galileo, 
38-40; marvelous, of Darwin, 285. 

Infinite, the, pervades the finite, 
139-145. See Idealism. 

“ In Memoriam,” 246. 

Inner life, period of the study of the, 
from Locke to Kant, 68, 474; its 
general characteristics, 68-74,475. 

Insight, novelty of Kant’s, 114, 115. 

Intellect, will deeper than, Schopen¬ 
hauer, 252. 

Irrationalismus, doctrine of, 237-239. 

Jena, a literary centre during the 
romantic era, 170. 

Jew, Spinoza a, by birth, 44. 

Kant, mission of, in modern thought, 
34, 35, 75, 100, 135; difficulties in 
the study of, 103-105; his person 
and life, 106-109; consistent de¬ 
velopment of his religious belief, 
110, 111; his piety contrasted 
with Spinoza’s mysticism, 111, 112, 
114, 134; the moral law revealed 
by conscience, 112-114; faith not 
a dogma, but an active postulate, 
114-118,433; his early philosoph¬ 


ical development, 119-122; the 
subjectivity of space and time, 
122-124; awakened from “dog¬ 
matic slumber ” by Hume’s skepti¬ 
cism, 93, 102, 125, 126; his “ Cri¬ 
tique of Pure Reason,” 34, 102, 
126, 476,483; laws of nature must 
conform to laws of thought, 126, 
127; the transcendental unity of 
apperception, 128, 487-491; the 
constructive imagination, 129,130; 
deduction of the categories, 128, 
131, 483-491; absolute certainty 
of the moral law, 132, 133; out¬ 
come of his doctrine, 134-139; its 
transformation the common task 
of post-Kantian German idealists, 
139-145; Fichte, and, 150, 151, 
154; Schelling, and, 193, 217; 
Hegel, and, 201, 204, 217; Scho¬ 
penhauer, and, 237-239, 253, 265, 
266 ; his influence upon the doc¬ 
trine of evolution, 27l, 286. Sum¬ 
mary of lecture, books, and doc¬ 
trine, 476, 477. See Deduction of 
the categories. 

Kirchoff, “ Vorlesungen fiber Mathe- 
matische Physik ’ ’ by, cited, 398. 

Knowledge, a scrutiny of its basis 
demanded, by Locke, 83; by Kant, 
125; in modern problems, 339. 

Konigsberg, birthplace of Kant, 106; 
Kantian archives in, 120. 

Lagrange, 272. 

Lange, F. A., his criticism of meta¬ 
physicians, 4. 

Lanier, Sidney, his poem “ How 
Love looked for Hell,” 442; ex¬ 
presses a false religious optimism, 
443-445. 

Language, nature a divine, Berkeley, 
91. 

Laplace, nebular hypothesis of, 106, 
110; his “ Celestial Mechanics,” 
272. 

Law, sanction of, in the seventeenth 
century, 31; laws of nature, Berke¬ 
ley, 91; Kant, 126; moral, cer¬ 
tainty of, Kant, 132, 133; the 
universe its embodiment, Fichte, 
152, 159, 160, 166, 167, 174, 191. 

Lectures, general purposes of, the, 1, 
473 ; studies of thinkers and prob¬ 
lems, 25 ; suggestions of doctrine, 
309; summary of the historical, 
473-480; of the positive, 480-482. 




INDEX. 513 


Leibnitz, historical position of, 33, 
70; his philosophical theology, 71; 
his monadology, 409; his opti¬ 
mism, 440. 

Lessing, the forerunner of classical 
German literature, 169. 

Life, inner, period of its rediscovery, 
Spinoza to Kant, 68-100, 274,475 ; 
an embodiment of God’s life, with 
Fichte, 144, 145; with Sclielling, 
186; paradoxes of the, Hegel, 204- 
210; the will, Schopenhauer, 254- 
256; a deeper self, 372-374, 470. 

Lisbon, earthquake in, A. d. 1758, 70. 

Literature, German, classical period, 
166-170. 

Locke, second period of modern 
philosophy begins with, 33; his 
career and character, 78 ; origin of 
his “Essay on the Human Under¬ 
standing,” 79-80; historical value 
of his insistence upon a knowledge 
of the scope of human reason, 
80-82; ideas not innate, 79, 82; 
their origin in sensation and reflec¬ 
tion, 83, 84; his influence upon 
the study of the inner life, 84-86. 
See pages 474, 475. 

Logic, the world not explained by, 
of seventeenth century, Kant, 
119, 120; categories of Hegel’s 
“ Logic,” 218; its dialetical 
method, 219-222; its universal 
Idee, 222-226, 492-506. 

Logos, the, the deeper self, 372-380; 
evolution in the universe of, 381; 
the world of description real as an 
aspect of, 408,416, 422; the world 
of appreciation is the system of 
the thoughts of, 415-434,454-461; 
this world the choice of a rational, 
437, 439, 440, 469-471. 

Lombroso, the Italian psychologist, 
242. 

Love, false optimistic, in a poem of 
Lanier, 442-447. 

Love-letters of Fichte, 147-150. 

Lyell, 285. 

Mach, “ Die Mechanik in ihrer Ent- 
wickelung” by, 398. 

Man, regarded as a mechanism, in 
seventeenth century, 28; if such, 
a knowing mechanism, in the sec¬ 
ond period, 32; two forms of his 
religious interest, 45, 46. See 
Life. 


Martineau, “Study of Spinoza” by, 
475. 

Matter, an expression of the divine 
substance, Spinoza, 63-65; proof 
of its existence, Descartes, 76; 
causes sensations, Locke, 83; a 
world of ideas, Berkeley, 87, 92; 
laws of, must conform to laws of 
thought, Kant, 122,125,131; “ the 
material for our duty,” Fichte, 
152; “ permanent possibilities of 
experience,” Mill, 359; an external 
aspect of the Logos, 415-419. 

Maximos, in Ibsen’s “ Emperor and 
Galilean,” 37. 

Meaning, analysis of, 370, 371. 

Meiklejohn, his translation of Kant’s 
“ Critique of Pure Reason,” 102, 
174. 

Memory, paradox of consciousness 
illustrated by, 205, 206. 

Metaphysics, value of, 22-24; Kant 
“a lover of,” 120. 

Metempsychosis, a new form of, 283. 

Method, mathematical, of Spinoza, 
58-60; dissatisfaction with, in the 
eighteenth century, 69, 93; ana¬ 
lytic and synthetic methods, of 
idealism, 350, 351. 

Middle Ages, the, the typical period 
of romance, 278. 

Mill, John Stuart, his definition of 
matter, 359. 

Mind, a revelation of the divine sub¬ 
stance, Spinoza, 63-66; its innate 
truth, Descartes, 75, 76; a blank 
tablet, written on by experience, 
Locke, 74,79-86 ; one omnipresent, 
Berkeley, 91; the world of appre¬ 
ciation, 368, 415-419. 

Mind-stuff, theory of, Clifford and 
Dr. Prince, 300-304, 415. 

Miracles, denied, Spinoza, 29, 70. 

Monads, of Leibnitz, 409. 

Monism, as “Double Aspect” doc¬ 
trine, 300-304; applied to the 
world of the Logos, 415-434. 

Mood, the skeptical, 71-73. 

Morals, doctrine of, Kant, 112-114; 
as “ ethical idealism,” Fichte, 152- 
163. 

Mozart, on artistic production, 456, 
457. 

Muller, Max, his translation of Kant’s 
“ Critique of Pure Reason,” 476. 

Music, best portrays the essence of 
the will, Schopenhauer, 256; in 



514 


INDEX. 


illustration of the paradox of the 
moral order, 456. 

Mysteries, the only insoluble, those 
absurd to ask, 846. 

Mysticism, parallel between, the, of 
Spinoza and of the “Imitation,” 
51-55; philosophic, of Spinoza, 
55, 66; hated by Locke, 80, 88; 
Kant’s piety opposed to Spinoza’s, 
111-114; of the historical church, 
145 ; the pessimistic type, Scho¬ 
penhauer, 245, 246; its attitude 
towards evil, 450-453. 

Napoleon, defeat of, advances the 
historical movement, 276, 281, 282. 

Naturalism, period of, from Galileo 
to Spinoza, 27, 474. See Galileo, 
Spinoza. 

Nature, a vast mechanism, by Gali¬ 
leo, 38-41; by Spinoza, 58-66; 
laws of, the order of ideas, Berke¬ 
ley, 91; must conform to laws of 
thought, Kant, 122-125, 131; a 
work of unconscious art, roman¬ 
ticists, 175; Naturphilosophie of 
Schelling, 184-189, 193; my duty 
made manifest to my senses, 
Fichte, 192; the philosophy of 
Hegel, 218. See Evolution. 
Nature and Evolution,” Lecture X; 
critical study of the world under 
the assumption of realistic science, 
312; its changes, “redistribu¬ 
tions ” of matter and energy, 313; 
their character and extent, 313, 
314; suggest a general process of 
physical evolution, 314, 315; the 
law of the “degradation” of 
energy, 316, 317; this cessation of 
evolution raises question of its 
beginning, 318; Clifford’s hypo¬ 
thesis of a definable endless pro¬ 
cess, 318-321; the cyclical pro¬ 
cess, 322, 323, 334; difficulties in 
an endless process of aggrega¬ 
tion, 324,325 ; and dispersion, 325- 
327; avoided by the gravitative 
system, 328-331; the endlessly 
consolidating matter not the ulti¬ 
mately real world, 331-336; fore¬ 
going paradoxes due to a hypo¬ 
thetical account of a world-process 
in terms of experience, 337, 338; 
necessity of a critical study of the 
knowing power of man, 338, 339; 
permanent lesson of modern ideal¬ 


ism that the inner and outer world 
must have organic relations, 339, 
349. See Reality and Idealism. 

Natural science, axioms of, relate to 
world of description, 397-490. 

Natural selection, Darwin’s theory 
of, 285-287, 289. 

Necessity, mathematical, of Spinoza, 
58-61; its conception the result of 
habit, Hume, 95-97. 

Negativitat , Hegel’s formula of, 
213-218; less conceivable tham 
Spencer’s cosmical evolution, 297. 

Newton, his conception of physical 
science, 274; his “ Principia,” 
286. 

Nihilism, the outcome of an arbitrary 
idealism, 180. 

Novalis, his character, 177, 178; tale 
of his love, illustrative of romantic 
idealism, 178-180. 

Objects of human knowledge, innate, 
with Descartes, 77; given by sen¬ 
sation and reflection, Locke, 83, 
84; ideas and spirits, Berkeley, 90, 
91; impressions and ideas, Hume, 
94-98; the meaning of, 375-377. 

‘ ‘ Omar Khay y dm, ” F itzgerald’s, 
stanzas from, 438. 

“ Optimism, Pessimism, and the 
Moral Order,” Lecture XIII; 
idealism both of theoretical and of 
practical interest, 435, 436; anti¬ 
nomy of the spiritual world, 437 ; 
(1) evil an essential in finite exist¬ 
ence, 437-439 ; (2) and the rational 
choice of this universe by the 
Logos, 437, 439,440; the problem 
of moral evil, 440, 441; the denial 
of its existence, 441, 442; illus¬ 
trated by a poem of Sidney Lanier, 
443-445; results in a false reli¬ 
gious optimism, 445-447; evil a 
reality, 447-449, 458; mystical re¬ 
signation of Spinoza and the “ Im¬ 
itation,” 450, 451; pessimism of 
Schopenhauer, 450, 452, 453; a 
synthesis of “ perfection in im¬ 
perfection ” demanded, 454; par¬ 
adoxes of the moral order, 454; 
the paradox of daily life, 454,455 ; 
of music, 456, 457; evil becomes 
part of the moral order only by its 
condemnation, 458-460; this solu¬ 
tion made possible by the organic 
personality of the divine Self, 



INDEX. 


515 


461; the mood of deepest doubt, 
461-464; the tragedy of brute 
chance, 465; illustrated by “ The 
Fool’s Prayer,” Sill, 465-468; our 
chance, the rationality of the infi¬ 
nite, 469-471; “ this world is the 
world of the Logos,” 471. 

Order, outer, see World; moral, see 
Optimism. 

Organism, Hegel’s universal an, of 
interrelated selves, 224, 225, 492, 
493 ; the world an, with a history 
of development, 275; a manifes¬ 
tation of the Logos, 418,419. 

Orient, the, records of, 278. 

Paradox, Hegel’s analysis of the, of 
consciousness, 203-217 ; of the re¬ 
lation of universal and individual, 
218-227, 492-506; Spencer’s, of 
evolution and the unknowable, 
296-300; in the moral order, of 
“ perfection in imperfection,” 437- 
440, 454-471. 

Passion, the logic of, Hegel, 219-227. 

Paul, the Apostle, 145, 402. 

Perception, clearness of, Descartes, 
76; by sensation and reflection, 
Locke, 83, 84; space and time 
forms of, Kant, 124. 

Periods of modern philosophy, 27-38, 
134. 

Personality, of the finite, Kant, 131; 
of the infinite, Fichte, 144, 145, 
161; of the absolute, Hegel, 224; 
of the Logos, 409-413, 434, 471. 

Pessimism, element of, in the “Im¬ 
itation,” 52 ; in Spinoza, 55 ; 
Schopenhauer, its reputed expo¬ 
nent, 228. See Schopenhauer; 
Optimism. 

“ Phanomenologie,” Hegel’s, cited, 
207, 208, 225, 494. 

Philosophy, not an effort to explain 
mysteries by any superhuman 
insight, 1; but an attempt to give 
a reasonable account of our per¬ 
sonal attitude towards life, 1; the 
result of a natural tendency to 
reflect critically upon life, 1-3; 
statement of the objection, to its 
numerous systems, 3,4 ; to its ap¬ 
parent futility, 5, 6; the defense: 
contemplative insight a necessary 
element in civilization, 7-12; 
truth, a synthesis of the various 
partial reflections upon life, 13-17; 


criticism necessary that worthy 
ideals may be discovered and main¬ 
tained, 18-22 ; its systems valuable 
by their record of spiritual experi¬ 
ence and by their bearings upon 
life, 22-24. 

Philology, influence of the romantic 
movement upon, 280. 

“Physical Law and Freedom,” 
Lecture XII; the idealistic inter¬ 
pretation of the outer order, 380- 
383 ; provisional characteristics of 
objective truth, 384; its perma¬ 
nence, 384; its universality, 384- 
387; its describability, 388; con¬ 
trast of describable and appreci¬ 
able experience, 388-392; nature, 
the world of description, 393-395, 
397; deduction of its categories, 
397-404; possible reality of an 
appreciable world, 393, 395-397, 
405; ideals and organic spiritual 
relations real, yet not describable 
facts, 405-408; the world of sci¬ 
ence presupposes the world of ap¬ 
preciation, 409-411; its categories 
of self-consciousness, 411-413; a 
world of freedom, 414, 415; the 
“ double aspect ’ ’ of the world of 
the Logos, 415-419; this doctrine 
applied to the facts of the inor¬ 
ganic world, 419-422; to evolution, 
422-428; to freedom of the will, 
428-434. 

Plato, his analysis of Hellenic life, 
9; Berkeley and, 86, 87. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, gloom of, the out¬ 
come of wayward idealism, 180. 

Pollock, “Spinoza’s Life and Phil¬ 
osophy ” by, 475. 

Post-Kantian idealism, aim of, 162. 

Postulates, Kant’s, of practical rea¬ 
son, 113, 141; of science, enriched 
by an idealistic interpretation, 272. 

Process, the “ cyclical,’ ’ 328, 334. 

Quantity, Hegel’s category, of, 218, 

220 . 

Rahn, Johanna, letters of Fichte to, 
147-149. 

Rationality, our chance the, of the 
infinite, 469-471. 

Realism, the assumption of, criti¬ 
cally studied, 311-340. See Nat¬ 
ure and Evolution. 

“ Reality and Idealism,” Lecture XI 





516 


INDEX, 


historical study necessary to re¬ 
flective confession, 341-344; ag¬ 
nosticism as to the causes of expe¬ 
rience, not opposed to idealism, 
344-348; the Logos not the cause 
but the soul of all reality, 348- 
350; (1) analytic idealism, 351; 
the world of knowledge, a world 
of ideas, 351, 352; their stubborn 
reality, 352-354; qualities of the 
sense-world, ideal, 355-357; its 
reality known only as a system of 
ideas, 357-360; hence a universal 
mind or an unknowable x, 360- 
364; (2) synthetic idealism, the 
absolutely unknowable, non-exist¬ 
ent, 365,366; the real world, mind, 
367,368; the self, meaning an ob¬ 
ject identical with the larger self 
that already has the object, 368— 
373; the reflective larger self real, 
in case of truth, 375, 376; of error, 
376, 377; of doubt, 379; the unity 
of the organic self, 373, 374, 379; 
the Logos, 374, 379, 380. 

Reason, human, trusted in the seven¬ 
teenth century, 30, 69; scrutinized 
in the eighteenth century, 33, 69; 
by Locke, 79; by Berkeley, 87; 
by Hume, 93; by Kant, 118, 476; 
theoretical and practical, of Kant, 
113, 141; identified by Fichte, 
158; principle of sufficient, Scho¬ 
penhauer, 249. 

Reflection, internal perception, of 
Locke, 84. 

Rediscovery of the inner life, period 
of, 68-100,474. See Locke, Berke¬ 
ley, Hume, Kant. 

Reicke, “Lose Blatter aus Kant’s 
Nachlass” by, 121. 

“Religious Aspect of Philosophy,” 
cited, 373, 382, 383, 411, 414. 

Religious interest, two kinds of, 47- 
57. 

Resignation, mystical, 263, 450, 451. 

Richter, Jean Paul, his characteriza¬ 
tion of Schopenhauer’s style, 104, 
244; of the German empire, 108, 
156. 

Riehl, “ Der Philosophische Kriti- 
cismus” by, 122. 

Romantic school, the, in philosophy, 
164; doctrines preceding, of Kant 
and Fichte, 164, 165; Fichte’s 
arbitrary ethical idealism supple¬ 
mented by, 166-169; in German 


literature, 169; the general move¬ 
ment, 170; members of the spe¬ 
cial school, 172; Fichte’s moral 
will replaced by emotion, 173,174; 
nature a work of unconscious art, 
174, 175 ; understood only by men 
of genius, 175; the philosophical 
attitude of, illustrated by life of 
Schlegel, 176, 177; of Novalis, 
177-180; Schelling, the prince of 
romanticists, 181; and Caroline, 
181-184; his “ Naturphilosophie,” 
184-187. Summary and literature, 
478. See Schelling. 

Rosenkranz, Karl, biographer of 
Hegel, 195, 479. 

Rousseau, self-analysis of, 33, 79. 

Sanity, the idea of, 128, 129. 

Science, natural, the study of, 7, 8, 
335, 336; recent advance of, 35; 
coherency in the world of, Kant, 
130; task of idealism in, 269-274, 
348; unification of, Spencer, 296- 
298; realism and, 312; the realm 
of, the world of description, 387- 
397; its presupposition, the world 
of appreciation, 410. 

Schelling, prince of romanticists, 
181; his Spinozism, 41, 181; and 
Caroline, 181-183; Fichte’s doc¬ 
trine of the Ego transformed by, 
184, 185; objective idealism of 
his “ Naturphilosophie,” 185, 186; 
of his “ Epicurean Confession of 
Faith,” 186-189; development of 
his doctrine, 191-193; his Identi- 
tats-System , 193, 194 ; and Hegel, 
193, 194, 218; Irrationalismus of, 
237. See page 478. 

Schiller, and Kant, 103,164; quoted, 
142; Goethe and, 170, 171. 

Schlegel, Augustus, a romanticist, 
172, 181, 478. # 

Schlegel, Friedrich, romantic critic, 
172; his romanticism, 176, 177. 
See page 478. 

Schleiermacher, the theologian of the 
romantic school, 172. 

Schmidt, Julian, ‘ ‘ Geschichte der 
Deutschen Literatur seit Lessing’s 
Tod ” by, cited, 150, 478. 

Schopenhauer, his popular repute, 
228, 229; general significance of 
pessimism, 229-232; development 
of idealistic caprice, 233-237; 
his idealism on a Kantian basis, 



INDEX. 


517 


237-239; caprice of the world-will, 
239, 240; ancestry of, 241; his 
temperament and pessimism, 241- 
244; Richter on his style, 244; his 
career, 246-250; his “Die Welt 
als Wille und Vorstellung,” 250; 
the world of experience, our idea, 
250; space, time, and cause, sub¬ 
jective, 250, 251; hence multipli¬ 
city, 251, 252; will, the essence of 
the world, 252, 253; “ That art 
Thou,” 253-255; art, its embodi¬ 
ment to the contemplative intel¬ 
lect, 255-257; opposition of will 
and contemplation, 257, 258; 
Hegel and, 259-261; estimate of 
his doctrine, 261-264; transition 
from romantic idealism to modern 
realism in, 265, 266. Summary, 
and works, 479, 480. 

Scott, influence of, on history, 279. 

Selection, natural, Darwin’s, 286, 
287. 

Self, absolute, the, with Fichte, 153, 
157-163; with Schelling, 193 ; with 
Hegel, 224, 492, 493; with Scho¬ 
penhauer, 252-255. See Logos. 

Self-consciousness, the desire for, 
94, 165; without will, no, Scho¬ 
penhauer, 252 ; paradox of, Hegel, 
204-217; the reflective, 375, 377, 
409, 411-414. 

Sensation, as source of ideas, Locke, 
83; all sensible qualities, sensa¬ 
tions, Berkeley, 87-90; “impres¬ 
sions,” Hume, 94. 

Shakespeare, Greek tragedy and, 
171; quoted, 468. 

Shelley, his “ Prometheus,” 226. 

Sill, Edward Rowland, “The Fool’s 
Prayer ” by, 465, 466. 

Sin, latent, 459; actual, 460. 

Skepticism, philosophical, nature of, 
18-22; value of, 71-74; true atti¬ 
tude toward, 99, 100. 

Socrates, Sehlegel and, 176. 

Solidity, an inference, Berkeley, 89. 

Space and time, forms of percep¬ 
tion, with Kant, 152-156, 477; 
with Schopenhauer, 250-253; as 
system of ideas, 358, 359; forms 
of the world of description, 398, 
412; antinomies due to false ap¬ 
plication of, to the world of ap¬ 
preciation, 420—422. 

Spencer, Herbert, development of 
his philosophy, 294, 295; compari¬ 


son of, with Hobbes, 296; with 
Hegel, 296; his synthetic task, 
296,297; his formula of evolution, 
297, 298; his unknowable, 297, 
298; paradox in union of his 
knowable and unknowable, 298, 
299; fruitfulness of his system, 
293, 294. See Reality and Ideak 
ism. 

Spinoza, exemplifies the philosophic 
piety of the seventeenth century, 
32, 43; opposing views of, 41, 42; 
his profound character, 42, 43; of 
Jewish ancestry, 44; excommuni¬ 
cated, 44; his “ Theologico-Politi- 
cal Tractate,” 45, 475 ; his power 
of dispassionate criticism, 45, 46; 
his adoration of the divine order, 
43, 46; two forms of religious 
consciousness, 46, 48; (1) the ac¬ 
tive, of St. Christopher, 47, 48; 
(2) the contemplative, of the “ Im¬ 
itation of Christ,” 48,49; parallel 
between his mysticism and that of 
the “Imitation,” 49-54; his mys¬ 
ticism united with a wonderful 
temperament of cynicism, 54-57; 
his doctrine founded upon geomet¬ 
rical methods, 58-60; his universal 
“Substance,” 60-62; its self-ex¬ 
pressions, body and mind, 63-65; 
his description in the “ Ethics ” of 
the wise man’s love of God, 65- 
67. Summary, dates, and works, 
474, 475. 

Stephen, Leslie, “ History of English 
Thought in the Eighteenth Cen¬ 
tury” by, 476. 

Stirling, J. H., “ Text-Book to Kant ” 
by, 194, 476; “Secret of Hegel” 
by, 479. 

“ Storm and Stress ” period of Ger¬ 
man literature, 34. 

Strauss, “Life of Jesus” by, 282. 

“ Substance,” Spinoza’s universal, 
60; the characteristics of, de¬ 
scribed, 60-62; its two knowable 
self-expressions, body and mind, 
63-65; in relation to Kant, 134, 
141; to Fichte, 158; to Hegel, 
219. 

Sublime, the, Kant on, 110. 

Tannhauser, 105. 

Tennyson, parallel between the moral 
world of, and of Kant, 113. 

Thales, 11. 



518 


INDEX. 


11 That art Thou,” “the life of all 
these things,” Hindoo phrase ex¬ 
pressive of Schopenhauer’s doc¬ 
trine, 253, 255; of the absolute 
Self, 307. 

Things in themselves, Kant’s doc¬ 
trine of, 125-127, 484, 485; re¬ 
jected by Fichte, 141, 152; and 
others, 104. 

Thought, existence the standard as¬ 
surance of, Descartes, 70; theo¬ 
retical limits of, Kant, 125; the 
laws of, the soul of things, Hegel, 
222; reflective self-consciousness 
necessary to uniformity of, and 
object, 375-380. 

Tieck, Ludwig, a romanticist, 172. 

Time, infinite, anomalous division of, 
involved in Clifford’s definable 
endless process, 327, 332-334; its 
avoidance by a suggested “ cycli¬ 
cal ” physical process, 328-331, 
334; the theory of “ double as¬ 
pect,” 422-428. See Space and 
Time. 

Tolstoi, his mystical resignation, 261. 

Tragedy, life a, Schopenhauer, 240, 
262-264. See Optimism. 

Trendelenburg, “ Logische Studien ” 
by, 479. 

Truth, the many-sidedness of, 12-14; 
“ the whole,” 14-15 ; innate, Des¬ 
cartes, 74; a matter of experience, 
Locke, 83; its divine language, 
Berkeley, 90; Hume’s doubts, 94; 
must be won, Kant, 117, 129, 138; 
belongs to the moral self, Fichte, 
152-156; an affair of genius, the 
romantic school, 174; the divine 
Idee , Hegel, 224, 492; describ- 
able, the outward symbol of the 
world of appreciation, 419-428; 
the Logos, 374-380, 415-419, 471. 

Types, of men, in Spinoza, 54; in 
Berkeley, 80 ; in Hegel, 199 ; in 
Schopenhauer, 244, 245; of re¬ 
ligious interest, 46, 47, 86; of 
pessimism, 245, 246, 461-465; of 
optimism, 446-450. 

Understanding, the, Kant’s cate¬ 
gories of, 131, 139, 483-491; He¬ 
gel’s universals of, 492-495. 

Universals, Hegel’s theory of, 222- 
226; the Idee not an “ abstract 
universal,’ ’ 492; but the organic 
totality of true individuals, 492, 


493; two kinds of, 493, 494; theii 
different degrees of reality, 494- 
496; Caird on the higher form of 
the, 496-499; transformation of 
the lower, into the higher by the 
dialectic processes, 500, 501; sub¬ 
stance as “ a simple whole,” 502; 
three phases of the higher, 503; 
the Idee as “Person,” 503; ethi¬ 
cal application of the theory of, 
503, 504; the universal Negativi- 
tat, 505; stages in the study of 
the, 505, 506. 

“ Unknowable,” Spencer’s, 297, 298; 
its impossibility, 367. 

“ Upanishads,” the Hindoo, quoted, 

253—2o5. 

Vaihinger, “ Zu Kant’s Widerlegung 
des Idealismus ” by, quoted, 486- 
488. 

Van Yloten and Land, a complete 
edition of Spinoza by, 475. 

Via Dolorosa, 136. 

Vision, Berkeley’s theory of, 87-90. 

“Vocation of Man,” Fichte’s, de¬ 
scribed, 160; quoted, 161. 

Wagnerian Briinliilde, 257. 

Wallace, “ Kant ” by, 476; “ Logic 
of Hegel” by, 479; “Life of 
Arthur Schopenhauer ” by, 480. 

Waterloo, the battle of, in relation 
to the modern historical move¬ 
ment, 276, 281. 

Watson, John, “ Selections from 
Kant” by, 476; “ Schelling’s 
Transcendental Idealism ” by, 478. 

Waywardness, of Fichte, 155, 166; 
as characteristic of the romantic 
period, 166, 176, 177, 186. 

“ Wilhelm Meister,” 171. 

Will, the moral world founded on, 
Kant, 114, 137; finite wills the 
embodiment of the infinite, Fichte, 
159 -163; all reality the will, 
Schopenhauer, 252-256; freedom 
of the, 428—434; and rationality, 
436-438,469-471. 

Windelband, “Die Geschiehte der 
neuern Philosophic ” by, 232. 

World, the, its unity and necessity, 
Spinoza, 60-63; a divine language 
Berkeley, 90, 91; the laws of, 
laws of thought, Kant, 126-132 ; 

the material for our duty ’ 1 
Fichte, 152-154; the manifesta- 




INDEX, 


519 


tion of spirit, Schelling, 192; the 
true, an organism, Hegel, 225,493; 
as idea and will, Schopenhauer, 
238, 250-253, 266; paradox of, 
of endlessly consolidating matter, 


330-340; idealistic interpretation 
of, 341-379; theory of “double 
aspect” applied to the problems 
of, 419-434; “ This world is the 
world of the Logos,” 471. 










0 * X 


Ar <f> ° 

* \ “ 
**’ A' » %, 

^ vi* * \e/rf??b \ ° 




<v> 

"* • ^ <* ** l s v ** ,'\ 

, 0 * c o »*,;<* ** / v 

0 * ^ ^ * 


A 


YszJS: • ■•’/•■•->■•"" /:^" 




<V 




CV * «V 
$> * V v = y* 

^: a ~+. * <$3 

s* 


^ v 

° A^ ® Wli 

X ^ -,■■'29' ■* a' 

& '0 . A 0 


W* /# 


A 





'* / S**, ^ #3N °’ \** . * 8 1 '* o^ 0 sT 

Jy O' '* V +'*<>, > A 0 V Oi 

a* * ** v. <>> jp *M 


% ^ 


v% ' v* ^,x* v 





x 0 ^. 



y O0^ 


o5 < 




*' ,2 O' * .9 N 0 ^ \V 

,0^ ^ S *Zj f t ^CV V * ' * 0 A 

A* *<* A 

* - r «£> << v 



V 


x 00 ^ 



a v <?• 



, v 

^ ^ O V/* ^ 

V .v 0 - %p ax 





c. r ve* * 


^ • 


</> \v . * V V 

«*. v , <r& v .-‘'.»? "■ ',ys$sr* ^ '\ 

%'% ” o 0 ^ .‘ 0 4 ^VV <, *'^'V^ % '^ 

**- - v - - +* $ : iMh* -■ ~o o' <* ®^0i' * 

v ,.., %*■ * mV v /\ v ,„%■ *»»•’ v < > *» ,y>"’" <>>, s^. 


•> > ■ 7 ^- 



x 0c U. 



rj - V 


»0o 



•X^ V ^ 


• s'. A 


x°°<. 


..,;v”-y:-->/”■•:>:, .;%' 





: VV A I 

/co^A^'r'V, 

'o o° ^ * 




Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
- Treatment Date: August 2004 


PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 






' V s » 

j ^ >- * vOo. 

■*£- c£ ' Zl»' ’ i i '* $ v 

V’ <*v. *- z " a oP Q-, *., 

*>. *ni* A 0 s . * . b > n 

^ Al-rJ*, c * v, 

*\> ^ rJV^gr /K ^ *” •' : • <* 

^ • "%• # “ ri^m : ^ ^ - 

cj> •%. 

* v? 

* o v 

t \ P ' *N 

■5* 



* ’ % \o^ A * * r J^-C * 0 *° ' V N V ^ * 0 , ^ v - • 0 r 

^ C* ^ ^ <* c <^ * 

^ ^ A V % = 

v.* %.*<** 1 *~ .. \ *' o’* y * 4 

"' 'Z*\ W ’•; cir ; K^ v *' ■•milfc* r«o* :«$ 

“**» ^ •*. x°°- *W£>i <* ■*. 

> 0 V:-^V’ ; *-V\.- V" 

.-Js v * <f> f-fla* ^ 

/'S * ^SSm * -*■’ v V> Or (J\N>>. An ° ■ ''S> 

aV V v *J O -V i. 

^ V *° &sV<f' :V /2 • ^ 




A 5 


** v ^ 


v 3 0 ° * ^ 

< ^sNAVh^ ^ 

**- v* 



9 : “So^ ?'{jjH|$: 

ll.»« ^o/ 0 ^ t° N C > V s ^ 1 / ^ ; ^ S°* C * 

« L ’ *%, *J 5 I 2 ^ + 

o o x 

.00 

«> Kp \s'-: or > x -<• 

A 

s ,0- ’O^ * .» u 0 * .** ^ * ? 1 '* ^ •> N 






M G 



t ^ 





ft/5 * X f . 1 |r.V ' •■ ~ 1 

^ xP ^ 0 ^ 

/ o}» \ \ . > >2 

A ^ 

” 0 N u \ V -<- -v 

: -§MA\ ^ : 

^ . v.^ * $% llmM; ^\ °^y$Ws / 

^ < VT^TA A ^6 0 « 

^ ^ O^C, '“ S i ( t'» ( 7 o. ,0> ^ 








w 

A" V 

A 9. 

Of- ^ 


































